[TorKlingberg]

Great read, but worth noting from the end of the article that "late feature" here means it was added in the early '90s. The late addition to Unix that surprises me is ssh. It was only invented in the late '90s. Before that everyone used unencrypted remote shells like telnet.

Encryption in general was in a pretty bad state in the '90s: original http was unencrypted and early mobile phone standards that are still in use have very weak encryption.

[zokier]

Everything was unencrypted until late 90s (and in many cases until late 00s). Email (both smtp and pop3/imap), irc, web, gopher, telnet, ftp, local disks, removable storage, network storage (smb/nfs etc), everything. Computing and the internet was much nicer place, there wasn't such an adversial attitude where everything would be broken just because its out there like today.

[errcorrectcode]

I started before CompuServe, Internet, or the internet were nouns.

It wasn't nicer back then, it was lazy and naïve.

3DES was widespread in the payment card industry, but the attitude towards protecting any/all parts of networks corresponding to the 7-layer OSI model was generally lax.

IPv4 public address ranges (mostly registered Class B's and C's) were wasted frivolously for internal corporate networks where they weren't suited or even necessary.

Unless they didn't know what they were doing, bank logins weren't unencrypted. Ever.

I and some lab peeps played with ARP and IP spoofing to steal each other's telnet sessions in the late 90's. It was obvious telnet, rcp, rsh, echo, char, finger, and nfs needed major reworking and/or abandonment.

Later, the Equifax hack broke SSN's as universal American private "UUIDs" (primary keys).

Things still broken as of 2022:

0. Without deploying 802.11x, DHCP by itself is still terrible because anyone spoof being a server and disrupt many communications on a LAN. Properly managed campus ELANs/WLANs should authenticate all WiFi and Ethernet connections equally and disconnect any misbehaviors at the port or AP-association level.

1. PII should be held by a secure, independent, nongovernmental nonprofit where it can be updated in one place and set access policies by the individual. Companies then can request access to it. That way, PII is treated more like medical records (PHI) and payment card info. For the most part, corporate customer data should be anonymized as much as possible by law.

2. There is no global universal standard identity / proximity card / secret keys HSM. Similarly, it should not be held or managed by any country, only issued by their organizations.

3. There is simultaneously too much anonymity for launching cyberattacks while not enough for protecting dissidents. Social media app operators should understand how much anonymity and identity-revealing/-proving is appropriate to ensure people invest-in and maintain a minimum amount of decency and empathy vs. cyberdisinhibitionism.

[mturmon]

Yeah, on the time sharing Unix systems I would use in the 80s and 90s, everyone’s home directory (and most everything under it) was world readable by default. You could change the permissions, but most people didn’t.

I feel like those old folks who tell of a time when people didn’t bother to lock their doors at night.

[usr1106]

The home directory of the 1980s was the github and Stackoverflow of today. When I had a problem I just run grep to see what others had done. There was no internet to ask anybody. And people did not do banking, store photos or anything like that on their computer. I guess mbox was read protected for group and others already back then.

[throwawayboise]

I think on Ubuntu/Debian this is still the default; the UMASK in /etc/login.defs is 022.

[usr1106]

But multiuser computers are much less the default then back then. Even kids have their own one because they need it in school (at least in this country).

[mongol]

I think OpenSuse too. I recently converted mine to user private group handling

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

[mprovost]

Encryption is CPU-heavy and CPUs weren't nearly as fast then as they are now. Unix was developed on systems like a VAX which could do 1 MIPS (millions of instructions per second). For comparison an M1 chip can do about 10 trillion instructions per second. It just wasn't possible to encrypt data in real time like it is now.

[usr1106]

Before Eternal September the Internet was trustworthy place. And criminals had not found it yet.

[teddyh]

Telnet has encryption options, it just wasn't widely implemented.