Change in cron policy?

[Stefan Bellon <sbellon@sbellon.de>]

Since one week I wasn't able to use crontab by my user accounts. The
message is

sbellon@io:~$ crontab -l
You (sbellon) are not allowed to use this program (crontab)
See crontab(1) for more information

The man page states, that when neither cron.allow nor cron.deny are
present, then the site-default of Debian is taken, which is to allow
all users the usage of cron.

I haven't knowingly changed anything on my system (apart from the usual
apt-get upgrades) and so wonder why there is a change in behaviour now.

The permissions of /usr/bin/crontab seem all right (root:crontab and
-rwxr-sr-x) as do the permissions of the actual files in
/var/spool/cron/crontabs (user:crontab and 600).

I was able to get the users using cron again by touching an empty
cron.deny file, but I'm still wondering ...

The system is Debian unstable, btw.

-- 
Stefan Bellon