Re: [Xouvert-general] Feature Request: Multiple Simultaneous Logins

[William Lahti]

On Sunday 17 August 2003 5:37 pm, Milo Hyson wrote:
> I don't know how many times someone here in the lab has bitched at me
> for locking a terminal and walking away from it for a few minutes. For
> security reasons we need to, but I understand the inconvenience of
> having to track the person down just to type in their password. What's
> needed is the ability to allow multiple people to simultaneously log-in
> to a system and easily be able to switch contexts to another user. WinXP
> already has this feature and I've heard that Apple is working on it for
> OSX. I talked with a few people in the XFree86 project who told me the
> security model (or rather the lack of one) would not permit such a
> feature as it would be all too easy for software to see what's on
> someone else's desktop and windows.
>
> If Xouvert is being taken in radically new directions, I think this is
> one that needs to be seriously considered.

XFree read my mind there, you see the X protocol allows you to request a list 
of toplevel windows. However... as for knowing what programs someone is 
running, XP shows all processes to all users at all times, so if you check 
the process list you will see all the users processes and you will know what 
that user is running. I think Xouvert/XFree could be changed to only return a 
list of the authorized windows though. So this feature is NOT ruled out yet. 
:).

-- 
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$ printinfo
Fury // a.k.a William Lahti
Developer, Xouvert
Developer, Slicker Project
Developer, Calyptos
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Linus' Law:
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 23:50:15  up 1 day,  6:24,  4 users,  load average: 0.95, 0.71, 0.54