|
|
|
|
|
|
by appleskeptic
962 days ago
|
|
|
Don’t forget that the anti-TPM stuff comes from the guy, RMS, who opposes “sudo” because it serves to let a machine owner control and audit use of super-user commands, whereas just having a root password shared by multiple users gives anyone who learns the password the freedom to do whatever they want with plausible deniability. He has a very strange and quaint way of thinking but people uncritically parrot him without appreciating what his world-view actually entails. |
|
|
> Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)
> However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.
> I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first.
He was talking about a time-sharing system in an academic context. We have no idea what his thoughts are now, and it's logically fallacious to discount his feelings on what multinational corporations bake into their silicon on the basis of an experience that he had back when Van Halen was still topping the charts. It isn't exactly a secret that RMS is a bit "out there" - lots of historically-significant people are. Contextualizing their work and speech in a constructive way is preferable to writing them off wholesale.
[1] https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/coreutils-4.5.4/html_nod...