lynx-dev anonymous usage of Lynx

[Philip Webb]

981008 Greg Barniskis wrote: 
> Philip Webb said:
>> I (capitalised for once) have no security problem,
>> nor do the majority of Lynx users & installers:
>> these problems arise ONLY for sites with anonymous users.
> private single-user installations surely outnumber public ones,
> but that's not a count of users, so no indication of majority, really.

no-one has ever suggested a way to count Lynx users,
but there has been a strong trend towards individual users
especially since the ports to DOS & Windows.
when Lynx got going, there were fewer PCs
& its early developers tended to be sysadmins.
 
>> better still, site managers should set up free shell userids
>> for people with valid library/student/etc cards:
>> miscreants can then be identified & expelled.
> I tend to agree, at least about expelling miscreants! 8)
> but library patrons get "tech support" (such as it is) from librarians, 
> and they couldn't handle unix. No way in the world could our 
> behind-the-scenes technical people be answering to patrons on shell 
> account issues, even if all their account did was to captive lynx.
> We'd end up managing something like 10,000+ lynx user accounts,
> perhaps many more (pool of potential applicants > 700,000).

do that many of your patrons actually use Lynx?
certainly encouraging if they do & a reason to support anonymous problems.
 
> On the flip side, many patrons prefer to be 100% anonymous
> and that is fine given our stance on their privacy rights.
> Come into the library and you don't actually need to provide any ID at all
> to search the catalog, read books, surf the web etc.
> This gives people the freedom to access potentially embarrassing information
> (e.g. "Learning to Live with AIDS" or "The Autobiogriffy of Dan Quayle")
> without fear of discovery/reprisal.

your catalog, books etc aren't involved in this discussion:
it's only access to the WWW via Lynx which is involved.
there are ways of browsing anonymously from ordinary shell accounts
& a user would have to be really paranoid to worry that someone was
following his/her tastes in sites among the megapersons doing it daily.
 
> so please, kind people, just do the best you can
> with development for anonymous environments.  Many, many thanks.
 
the problem is that catering for anonymous use of complex software like Lynx
bears a large cost in scarce volunteer labor, apart from sometimes creating
problems for other users inadvertently, as happened to me this week.
i'm not sure there is an active developer anymore
who runs a site with anonymous users.
how far should other people -- some of them in other countries --
be supporting the special needs of your library patrons?

you can protect yourself to some extent by confining anonymous Lynx users
to a separate machine, where they can only damage one another
& there's no other software, files etc to get hurt:
then it becomes a question of how many bad apples there are
& how many times you have to reboot or whatever.

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