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- From: kadie@herodotus.cs.uiuc.edu (Carl M. Kadie)
- Subject: WLU sys admins search out "nasty" filenames and passwords
- Message-ID: <1992Aug13.182157.5688@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
- Sender: news@m.cs.uiuc.edu (News Database (admin-Mike Schwager))
- Organization: University of Illinois, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Urbana, IL
- Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 18:21:57 GMT
- Lines: 100
-
- [This article, by Jim Boyce, jboyce1@mamut.wlu.ca, appeared on July
- 14th in the Wilfrid Laurier University's student newspaper, the Cord.
- It is posted with Jim Boyce's permission.]
-
- Questions have been raised about a program used by Computing
- Services to find profane file names. In May, The Cord obtained
- computer printouts from Kathy O'Grady, a student, which showed
- that the program was running as recently as last October and was
- designed to search through accounts in a section of the computer
- system and find files with the words "cunt", "shit" and "fuck" in
- their names.
- O'Grady said she had been sceptical of rumours about the
- program's existence until last summer when she saw it operating
- (it could be viewed by typing a computer command which causes all
- running programs to be listed on the screen). She said she
- continued to check the system regularly during the summer and the
- fall and found it several more times. Copies of the program were
- saved on computer and printed out by her and two other Laurier
- students as proof.
- Carl Langford, the Systems Administrator, said the program
- was started up two or three years ago and discontinued after a
- few weeks. The program discovered last year by O'Grady and other
- students was left running by mistake, he said, and had evaded
- detection because it ran sporadically and late at night. "As I
- recall, it was set to fire up at some ungodly hour of the
- morning," he said, but added that no action was taken with the
- results.
- Hart Bezner, Director of Computing Services, said the
- program operated routinely during the mid-eighties, "but it [the
- language] cleaned up so we quit looking." He also said that it
- may have been running as recently as the past year: "there was
- one occasion when we had a complaint and that must have been
- within the last six months, maybe eight months, and I think we
- ran it two or three nights on all six unix machines to see how
- big the problem was."
- Bezner, however, was not explicit as to what was done with
- the results from the program. A former Laurier student has told
- the Cord that the password to his account was changed last
- October, a few days before he had an assignment due. His password
- included the word "fuck" [in reference to a Kurt Vonnegut novel]
- and he said that when he contacted Computing Service, he was told
- he would have to get a new one: "They said that the computer went
- through and deleted nasty words".
- Bezner would neither confirm or deny that such incidents had
- happened saying that no account had ever been cancelled but it
- was, "quite possible that we changed a password".
- Langford and Bezner gave two reasons for intially creating
- the program.
- First, according to Bezner, there had been many complaints
- about profane file names during the mid-eighties. Some of these
- complaints came from within Computing Services: "When the
- operators do file saves, the names of files roll past and they
- appear on a printout or a screen or both... and what triggered it
- was a file called `curly cunt hairs'."
- Others came from computer users. Bezner said that during
- these years output from the laser printer carried file names in
- "inch-high letters" on the front page: "people flipping through
- their output would come across these words and it just wasn't
- very nice."
- He said that only the names of files were checked and never
- the contents.
- Secondly, according to Langford and Bezner, two students
- complained to Computer Services after seeing profane file names
- on terminals that other students were using. The program was then
- run to discover the degree to which profanity was being used.
- When asked whether those students should have been looking
- at the terminals Bezner said, "it happens quite accidentally"
- when they are passing by. He explained that the computer room was
- a public place and equated the incident with someone going into
- an elevator and seeing a swear word written on the wall.
- Kathy O'Grady, who has been the using the computers daily
- for more than two years, disagreed with such a comparison:
- "[Graffiti] forces the public to look at it, that's the whole
- point of graffiti, it makes people look at it.... When I'm typing
- in the main computer room I don't expect somebody to come up and
- look at what I'm writing."
- Furthermore, it does not explain why a password should be
- cancelled since it is known only to the user and cannot be seen
- by anyone else.
- O'Grady said she talked to a professor several times during
- the fall and winter about the program but decided to pursue the
- matter further and contacted Bezner. She said she wrote to him
- via computer mail and asked for an interview because she was
- thinking of writing an article for The Cord. Bezner responded
- with the following message: "If such a program still runs, it is
- a hangover from the distant past when such words were less
- acceptable. The program certainly doesn't appear to take any
- action. Will look into it. HB." (February 10, 1992).
- O'Grady said that she has not seen the program running since
- that time but has concerns that it might be "masked" or kept
- dormant until she has left the university. She continues to check
- for it regularly and maintains her opposition to such actions by
- Computing Services: "it is totally ridiculous for any individual
- or small group of individuals to determine the language that
- students, or even professors, use."
-
-
-
- --
- Carl Kadie -- kadie@cs.uiuc.edu -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
-