Position & proposal

[ET]

> From: Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
> To: lispos@math.gatech.edu
> Subject: Re: Position & proposal
> Date: Thursday, 05 June, 1997 05:46

> Seems like an artificial distinction to me. Didn't MIT run machines at
> one point that anyone from the Internet could log into and make changes
> to -- a remote hacking machine? Was that "production" or "development"?
> I maintain machines like that myself -- multiple users but it is well
> known that it can crash at any time.
>  
>  Paul Prescod

ITS had that property.  You could map anyone's address space into
your own, or watch take over their tty remotely.  It worked nicely until
a young MIT hacker abused it enough to have them install a new just
for him.

This new hack gave the illusion that you were remotely modifying
the other address space while in fact you were doing nothing.  I
won't name the young hacker, but Greenblatt refers to the solution
as ``the Sussman hack''