"People isually feel terrible, very embarrassedvery bad, feel like less than worth people feelpublicly humiliated, at risk..." Glennmullen said.
"They live in terror that someone in theirfamilies will discover it," Glennmullen said."There is a great deal of fear among men that ifthey died accidentally they wouldn't be able toremove the material before they died."
History of Unix
Steen said one reason that HASCS is dealingwith these issues on a case by case basis is thehistory of Unix, the operating system that runsmost of the HASCS machines.
"Unix was designed to share files andinformation," Kim said. "Not to make it secure."
"The point was just to make the computer work,"Tarr said. "The original designers never intendedUnix to be this operating system that governs theInternet. It was never supposed to be more thanthe system for two guys who wanted to program."
"All these mechanisms have been around sincethe early days of Unix," Tarr said. "And in thosedays the Internet was not used as commonly as itis today and issues of privacy were not asprevalent."
"So, although finger and last could be seen asan invasion of privacy, they were from days whenprivacy wasn't even an issue," Tarr says.
And it can be difficult to know how to modifythe commands so that less information is availablebut the rest of the Unix system still works.
"We're making the [log file] not readable,"Steen said this week. "But I don't know whatimpact that will have. It may affect somethingelse that needs it. We'll have to wait and see."
Gwertzman said that there is no way of dealingwith all the privacy issues in one comprehensiveaction.
"But we can only fix these problems as theycome up," Gwertzman said. "It would be hard todeal with these problems in any other way than acase-by-case basis."
Gwertzman points to Harvard's computerguidelines, available both on-line and in abooklet, as evidence that there is an overallprivacy policy.
"I think we have set up some guidelines, which,even though they are kind of vague, indicate whatwe are trying to do," Gwertzman said.
Steen says people have come to see Harvard'scomputer services differently now than in theirearly days.
"Instead of just maintaining the machines, wenow provide a utility, a service," Steen says. "Wehave to give advance notice of down-time. We'resubject to all sorts of scrutiny. People depend onus."