[PLUG] Cookie bear for Unix?

[Tyler F. Creelan]

This reminds me - Is there a unix clone of the multics "cookie bear"
program ?  That is, the program you could run on someone's terminal and it
would keep printing "Can I have a cookie?" until the user typed "cookie",
then go into the background to run again later?

I've found the source for the old MIT Multics version, written in PL/1,
but it seems someone would have ported it to Unix in 25+ years...


More info:
------------------
Origin of the Cookie Monster

The idea for the program was born during a Senior House bull session in
1970. Seth Stein, an MIT freshman from Providence, volunteered a story
about an IBM computer operator at Brown who liked to tease his users by
locking out their terminals and manually sending them messages asking for
a cookie until they typed "cookie." "Say," I immediately thought, "this
concept cries out for automation!"

The programming itself was relatively simple, and was done during a
vacation week on a 2741 that SIPB had recently installed into the dorm for
student use.

Because of Multics' fine security, the perpetrator usually had to wait
until his victim left a terminal unattended to cause the program to run in
the victim's process. Occasionally, a user left one or more of his files
unguarded, allowing a tormentor to insert a command to invoke the cookie
program in that user's start_up command file, his abbreviatioe ever
involved.)

The hack was made truly difficult to find and purge by an unusual feature
of Multics: the ability for a program to set an alarm timer and then
terminate. At the specified time, the alarm timer would invoke a program,
exactly as if the user had typed a command. That program could set another
alarm timer, and so on. (The closest analogy I can think of is UNIX cron,
except that no processes other than the user's own were ever involved.)

...http://www.multicians.org/cookie.html



Tyler


On Mon, 28 Oct 2002, Russell Evans wrote:

> Interesting, a hostname change would invalidate your magic cookie. I think kdm
> would still use the old magic cookie but starting x from a console you just
> logged into, would create a new cookie. Well if you or dhcp didn't change your
> hostname, then maybe there is another way to invalidate a magic cookie?
>
> Restart kdm if you haven't.
>
> Thank you
> Russell
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, 28 Oct 2002 16:11:19 -0800, Michael Montagne said:
>
> > No, it's been a while since I've restarted X, I suppose things could
> >  have changed.  But that wasn't one of them.
> >
> >  >On 28/10/02, from the brain of Russell Evans tumbled:
> >
> >  > Did your hostname change?
> >  >
> >  > Thank you
> >  > Russell
> >  >
> >  >
> >  > On Mon, 28 Oct 2002 14:38:23 -0800, Michael Montagne said:
> >  >
> >  > > This is strange.  My mouse suddenly stopped responding so I restarted X.
> >  > >  Well kdm dutifully came up but my login attempts always failed.  I could
> >  > >  go to the console and login and then start X using "startx".  How can I
> >  > >  troubleshoot that?  The other side effect is that now rxvt does not
> >  > >  respect my .Xresources settings anymore.  I wonder if these are related.
> >  > >  I'm running Debian Sarge/Sid and using Rox-Session and IceWM.
> >  > >
> >  > >
> >  >
> >  >
> >  > _______________________________________________
> >  > PLUG mailing list
> >  > PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> >  > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
> >
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG mailing list
> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
>