On Thu, 6 Nov 1997, Co-Sysop wrote:
->[long message snipped]
->
->About the pfiles...Personally, I really don't care whether the player files
->take up more space because they are ascii or less space because they are
->binary. I remember a debate on the list about ascii pfiles and the topic
->of security was discussed. From what I have heard, a lot of imps don't
->have root access (or acceess to anything besides the MUD on their server).
->That means that someone else can access the player files. I realize that
->if someone does tamper with the pfiles you probably shouldn't be using that
->server anymore but I like to have a secure MUD. I can't open up my pfile
->with a text editor and change things but I can use set to do a lot of it
->and when I find something I can't do with set I will just write a command
->(or make some additions to set). I don't use ascii pfiles.
Uhm, and it's impossible for someone to read a binary text file?
Hahah. All they need is the structures; and those they can get right
out of structs.h (which they'll logically have access to, if they're
root and really want to). Then it's just a matter of writing a small
program to read in the data. And they can write a similar program to
write out the data. In fact, it'd be ridiculously easy to have a
program go through and change everyone's passwords. Anyway, I don't
want to bother with writing ascii pfile stuff, anyway.
->I'm sure your all sick of me by now so I will leave you to attempt to
->interpret my scribbling (and my excessive use of parenthesis)
Better than excessive ellipses or hyphens or semi-colons (I'm guilty
of that, it's coder mentality) or bad grammar (or spelling grammar as
"grammer"). Or, like me, not having a lot of parenthesis comments,
but having the comments be excessively long (e.g., longer than the
rest of the message).
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