On Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 01:03:57PM -0500, Dave Sherohman wrote: | On Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 12:07:33PM -0400, D-Man wrote: | > It seems natural to me that my home dir is my own private property. | > Kind of like having your own room or a clubhouse as a kid, with a sign | > "Keep Out" on the door. Making it world readable seems like leaving | > the door open, then wondering why someone is able to snoop about ;-). | | Yeah, but kids have to put their own "Keep Out" signs up. They | don't come by default with the door.
:-) | > I don't mean that unix in general is insecure, but that in this | > particular aspect it seems to be. | | I still fail to see how it is insecure. Different than what you, personally, | might expect, but individuals' expectations are not the ideal standard on | which to judge security. Ok. | > I wasn't really complaining, just curious. I am certain that there is | > some history buried in here, like a great deal of other features in | > Unix. | | Even outside of the Open Source/Free Software circles, *nix culture has, IMO, | always seemed very oriented towards sharing and collaboration. It seems | natural to me, then, that home directories would traditionally have | permissions set such that their contents can be shared and collaborated upon. ... | It just seems a lot more reasonable to me for the default to be that most | things are open, but you can create hidden areas rather then for everything | to be hidden and no easy way to expose a small part of it without also | revealing everything else. Well, public_html is very open and shared, yet my home dir still isn't world readable. I have no argument against world executable -- that is what allows people to get to an open subdirectory (like public_html) for the sharing and collaboration. -D
