Re: lynx-dev anonymous usage of Lynx (was Arizona)

[Philip Webb]

981010 Jason McBrayer wrote: 
> Philip Webb <address@hidden> writes:
PW> 981009 Ian White wrote: 
>> What about places where Lynx (with restrictions) is a shell
>> for users (with their own seperate accounts).
PW> either such users are equivalent to anonymous users
PW> -- you don't trust them loose in a normal system --
PW> or you can give them normal unrestricted shell access.
> Maybe on a Freenet you want users to be able to do www, mail, and news,
> but not do anything that might eat up more system resources
> (like running `find` from the root directory)
> or any other silly things they might be wont to do.
> Or you have a very small support staff and so want to limit
> the variety of things that can be done wrong.

a freenet sounds at least equivalent to anonymous users
& your description certainly matches people
you don't want to let loose on a normal system,
at least if your resources are limited.
 
> I am corresponding with someone who is using Lynx as a BBS door on OS/2.
> Anonymous mode is too restrictive for his use (because it blocks out
> all access to ftp URL's), but he MUST disable such things
> as subshells, save to disk, etc.  Since OS/2 doesn't have
> multiuser security, shell accounts are not an option. 

again, he doesn't trust them loose with his subshells & disk;
since OS/2 doesn't have multi-user security,
why is he using it for this purpose, rather than eg Linux?

one of my points is that highly valuable Lynx developer time is
to some extent being used by people out there
to get away with cheaper lazier solutions.
responses & examples so far have tended to confirm my suspicion.

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