5/24    In response to the moronic-nutjob-Stormfront-links, I wrote a script to
        watch which hozers are editing the motd. To catch the bastard, merely
        edit the motd with a reply giving a timestamp as soon as you notice it.
        I'll come a running. And yes, your secrets are safe with me.
        --michener
        \_ If you have the power to squish, you should squish. Personally,
           I'm offended by the ranting racist freeper URLs and I'm tired
           of whoever's been posting them. They add little value to motd
           and offend me greatly, not to mention it borders on harrasing
           everyone else, and most importantly, "being a h0zer" which is
           a squishable offense. I ask you kindly to squish whoever's
           been posting these things. Thank you michener.
        \_ You just need to catch whoever's doing the following:
           % vi freerepublic
           % cat freerepublic /etc/motd.public > temp
           % cp temp /etc/motd.public
           I already know who's been doing this without using a script.
           \_ How do you know I am not mounting Soda's drives with
              FUSEFS and SSH on my home linux box?
              White Power!  14 Words! - danh
        \_ What about people who use scp?
        \_ I'm confused as to what you're requesting. Also, can we view your
           source? I'm just interested in how you're doing this.
           \_ How I was doing it is ~michener/watchmotdprocesses
           \_ Only using what anybody else could watch. Essentially, it's
              logging the output of ps to a file. ~michener/watchmotdprocesses
              for the full script.
           \_ Essentially, what I'd like is this:
                Wed May 24 10:56:15 PDT 2006
              \_ I asked bc I thought you were doing something cool/tricky
                 like what kchang is doing. but i don't know what he's doing
                 and he already gets a lot of shit for not being accurate.
                 Kchang, how does your name-guessing algorithm work?
                 \_ It's actually not that complicated. I assign villain
                    names to people based on a badly written semi-random
                    generator so certain people will get assigned to certain
                    villain names more frequently than the others. Why this
                    fascinates people who try to reverse engineer it,
                    baffles me a lot. I guess people like mysteries and
                    thrive on solving puzzles that don't exist in the
                    first place.                                -kchang
                    \_ The pp is asking about the actual person detection
                       process you use, assuming it's something better than
                       michener's running ps every 2 seconds. Like, maybe
                       you are also seeing who is idle/not idle when motd
                       changes. You must have something like that for
                       your "these people maybe did it" lists. I'm no
                       unix expert though and there are probably tools
                       I don't know about that would also help. Especially
                       with root access.
                       \_ My information gathering mechanism is exactly what
                          michener uses, albeit a lot more probalistic based
                          post-processing involved. In another word, it does
                          not catch people doing scp, CGI-BIN based writes,
                          cp, or countless other mechanisms that escape the
                          "ps aux" call. If you are on the network like some
                          people in soda, you can definitely write a sniffer
                          and a motd-change correlator, and correlate IP,
                          scp actions, and motd changes and find the perp.
                          There are other things you can do. However, the
                          only solution that'll catch every single person is
                          a solution that requires root.        -kchang
        \_ Why does it require any response?  How is this any different than
           the phone lines being tapped "for our protection"?  And once you
           eventually do figure out who it is, then what?  Squish them?  What
           about that whole free speech thing?  Does that only apply to people
           we agree with?  I find the posts repulsive and just ignore them
           without comment.  Feeding the trolls only makes it worse.
           \_ I'll stop if it's too big a problem, but frankly, imo, whoever's
              trolling deserves reprimand and potential sorryage. With politb
              approval for the sorry, of course.
        \_ Alright, fine. Stopped. You deal with the fucker. Just expect me
           to be around motd less. --michener
              \_ Reprimand for what?  Posting perfectly legal political views
                 that don't match yours?  I'm totally serious.  I don't see
                 squishing people for posting their views to be appropriate at
                 what is supposed to be a liberal university.  How about
                 instead you ignore them or refute them?  Censorship and book
                 burning is not the answer.
                 \_ I agree with this.  I don't like those posts any more
                    than the rest of you, and I appreciate michener's intent,
                    but censorship / squishage based on our opinions of
                    what's reasonable doesn't seem appropriate.  -niloc
                    (I'm not saying logging would be wrong, necessarily.)
                    (I also acknowledge that certain posts, i.e. death
                    threats etc may be exceptions, and the line may be fuzzy.)
                    \_ Threats of harm, physical or otherwise, cross the line
                       from philosophical points about free speech and
                       censorship and into, well, harm.  I'd be ok with
                       stripping anonymity from the motd, so long as it was
                       truly stripped; I'd want the names to be public to
                       everyone, not just root and someone's buddy.  Otherwise
                       just leave it as it is.  As long as we're talking about
                       who posts what, I think edits and deletes should be
                       logged too if the motd goes that way.
        \_ Alright, fine. Stopped. Log deleted. You deal with the fucker.
           Just expect me to be around motd less. --michener
           \_ Addendum. You can't win if you try on soda. You have people
              bitching because this kind of stuff shows up on motd. You
              have (anonymous!) people bitching if you try to stop it.
              I am jaded. --michener
              \_ It isn't your responsibility to 'fix' it and I still don't
                 think anything is broken anyway.  Also, I don't think your
                 script would catch them.  I think your heart was in the
                 right place, but the people bitching about it should either
                 refute it or ignore it.  Censorship is never the answer.
                 \_ I'll be frank -- I think that trolling is trolling,
                    whether white-supremicist or tree-huggers. I want it
                    stopped, but recognize that I was pushing lines of power.
                    And yes, it is my responsibility. soda is my responsibility
                    and I want to make sure y'all have a good time, alums too.
                    That's all. Just so much conflict that, like I say, I'm
                    out, man, bitching on both sides is more likely to be
                    ignored now. --michener
                    \_ You'll also notice that the script used no power that
                       an average user doesn't have. Anybody could be watching
                       and remember that. --michener
                       \_ The script you posted is really not effective,
                          as most of the trolls have long ago figured out
                          ways to mask their edits.  (For example, reiffin
                          is very clever with "jove blah").  I think if the
                          politburo wants to do something about distasteful
                          or hate speech in the MOTD (which I think is a
                          reasonable thing to do), there's a simple,
                          effective solution; log edits.   -tom
                          \_ Noted. --michener
                          \_ Thanks for the show of support tom.  My technical
                             abilities are a bit higher than using a temp file
                             to hide anything especially since I told you years
                             ago I used 'blah' as my local copy.  If I was
                             trying to hide anything I'd do a better job than
                             that and I wouldn't tell you what I was doing.
                             The fact is I'm not doing anything special to
                             'cover' my motd edits because I have nothing to
                             hide.  If you're going to call anyone out, at
                             least get it right.  Have a nice day.
                             \_ Hey michener! The above was posted at 3:21PM,
                                can you find out who posted it?
          \_ michener you can do what you like really. I am in favor of
             squishing this particular troll. It's a judgment call, sure, and
             it's pretty obvious to me this moron has nothing to say that's
             of any substance. Just because some other anonymous douche is
             worried about it doesn't mean you have to give up. You have the
             power to decide which course of action is better. You can
             bet that with our group there's gonna be dissenters on any
             decision... better IMHO to listen their comments but stick to
             what you feel is right. After all that's why we have positions
             of power and elections. The reason for squishing the moron/troll
             isn't about censoring opinions. It's about harassment ultimately
             and these very few anonymous morons have already driven away
             plenty of folks from the motd. Maybe that's no big deal but if
             we happen to find out who it is then just pull the trigger.
             \_ or you can just delete the MOTD every 3 minutes like paolo
                did
                \_ Or you can keep bitching about paolo like tom did
                   \_ Or you can practice revisionist history like dans did
             \_ I think my current stance for the time being (and probably the
                summer) will be squish him if we figure out who it is by some
                telltale sign or other, and discuss motd trolls first time I
                can unite the politburo. --michener
                \_ Remember, we went through this just last
                   semester. -jrleek
                \_ Remember, we went through this just last semester. -jrleek
                   \_ Wow, how curious that this comes up once again.  The
                      CSUA doth move in cycles.  Well to summarize my
                      understanding of the decision in the past it was that
                      we would purposefully not log the motd, for a number of
                      reasons, one of which, personal privacy, and another of
                      which, the mere existence of logs allows them to be
                      susceptible to a subpeona (say someone threatens to kill
                      someone... etc).  I think we made the right decision
                      then, this particular world editable cesspool works well
                      enough through personal censorship.  It was also agreed
                      that the only real definitive way to log motd edits
                      would be with a kernel patch.  Also, at one time there
                      was work (or at least interest in) a much more protected
                      form of MOTD editing than /csua/bin/motdedit (which
                      would make it harder for people to log users' edits).
                        -mrauser