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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Someone on Reddit says that his site might have been vandalized, and that it was previously vandalized yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dambxx/stallman_step...

It's a bit suspicious because a) he just said two days ago that he has no intention of stepping down from GNU https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2019-09/msg00008... and b) there's another copy of the entry dated yesterday, deeper on the page: https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#27_September...

It 100% wouldn't surprise me if he didn't have adequate security for his personal website. He comes from a culture of leaving doors unlocked and passwords unset, and he also doesn't actually participate in the modern web (he has a daily cronjob that emails him text dumps of web pages he wants to read, he doesn't "browse" the web in any me), and his personal site is probably not actually run by the FSF or anyone else with experience in running websites.

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I feel like I remember him running Unix servers back in the 1990s that were deliberately insecure, because computer security was itself immoral. I don't know that he actually runs this site, though.

I've heard a story from an MIT staffer that the Morris worm of 1988 was first released from a public workstation logged in as username rms, password rms.

I tried to verify this but couldn't find it. However, I did find that counter-hackers changed Morris' username from RTM to RTFM to get back at him [1], so I'm not sure he used the username 'rms'. Maybe the staffer got mixed up?

[1] Page 155: https://books.google.com/books?id=oLHMBK0iGkkC&pg=PA155&lpg=...

The implication is that Morris used Stallman's (publicly well-known) username and password to log in at MIT, in order to cover up his tracks. Morris was a Cornell student at the time and wouldn't have had a login at MIT at all.

If you trust the SSH banner, it's running the OpenSSH version from Debian wheezy (end of support April 2016, end of LTS May 2018).... I feel like that's more likely failure to upgrade than a deliberate choice, though :)

Check the last section of https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/coreutils-4.5.4/html_nod...:

"Why GNU su does not support the `wheel' group

"(This section is by Richard Stallman.)

"Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)

"However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.

"I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first. "

GNU Project founded out of persecution complex.

In the late 80's the FSF had some machines at MIT you could telnet to without a password. they were a mess.

A user on r/StallmanWasRight writes, "I've been in email contact with him and he asked me about this a couple of days ago." and "I don't think it's a money issue, anyway... it's a bit strange. I'm not sure what the issue is or why he's asking for help with housing.

The GNU resignation statement no longer appears on his website.

Still does for me.

For some reason, the the GNU resignation was posted on both the 27th and the 28th. The 28th post that OP linked has been deleted, but the first one remains at https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#27_September...

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