locked out of home directory??

[James Knott]

Dave Mason wrote:
> For another datapoint, Richard Stallman had his home directory world
> writable I believe into the '90s partly as a political statement.
>   
A lot of hackers, back in those days, didn't think anyone should have
confidential information on their computer.  They tended to consider
computers "toys" for their personal benefit.

> What I have used a lot is group writable directories with the g+s bit
> set, which makes files/directories created to have the group of the
> enclosing directory.  Combined with a umask of 002 (or 007) this means
> that things are very shareable among groups.  This even works with your
> home directory since it is usually a private group.... except... ssh
> doesn't like $HOME or $HOME/.ssh writable by anybody except the owner,
> so I have my home directory set to 755 (except on machines that I share
> with 1000 students where it's 711), and most other directories set to
> 775.
>
> Locking your home directory has little relationship to the internet -
> unless there are users of you machine with easily guessable passwords -
> rather it's the other users on the machine.
>   

I'm sure on a home computer, parents might want to keep certain things
confidential.


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