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Re: firewalls immoral?



On Wednesday 22 May 2002 20:28, Craig Dickson wrote:
> begin  Tobin Fricke  quotation:
> > I think your idea that a GNU System shouldn't allow the sysadmin to limit
> > the freedoms of the users is pretty ridiculous.  After all, it's the
> > sysadmin who owns the machine, pays for the network connection, is
> > responsible for network traffic originating at the machine, etc...
>
> Yes, but aren't you forgetting that GNU is the brainchild of RMS, who
> once campaigned to have users set their password to the empty string on
> the grounds that denying anyone access to the computer was immoral, and
> who also has objected to the concept of a "wheel group" as a fascistic
> tool of admins who wrongly think they should have more power than the
> average user? In that context, the idea that firewalls are immoral makes
> perfect sense. If some script kiddie in Bulgaria wants to take over or
> DoS your machine, then why shouldn't they? Firewalls are for the kind of

I'm sorry to hear that bulgarian kiddies could take over or DoS your boxes. 
I'm bulgarian and feel this statement quite abusive. All I can say is - it is 
not fair, please apologize.  

> despicable fascist who thinks he has rights to a piece of hardware just
> because he paid money for it.
>
> Now, sarcasm aside, to be fair, RMS objected to passwords and wheel
> groups in the context of a university CS lab (one with significant
> government funding, courtesy DARPA) that had traditionally done just
> fine without such things, and was getting them not because of any real
> threat, but just because of an administrative power grab. For that place
> at that time, he was probably right (and I say "probably" only because I
> wasn't there). I don't know if he would argue today against passwords
> and wheel groups in the context of the modern internet, on machines that
> belong to businesses or private individuals. I hope not.

I think that nowadays firewall capabilities are as much mandatory as the 
system's capabilities of running ELF binaries. Anyone has a.out around ?  

-- 
Greets,
fr33zb1


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