Athena Account Deactivations

[dmaze]

Athena account deactivations happened last week. I generally don't shed many tears over this; on some level, it seems right to me that people should eventually leave the MIT community. In turn, this means that I've gotten slightly bitter over people who have managed to keep an online presence somehow. It's certainly easy enough: a private Un*x machine is sufficient to get you access to MIT's internal messaging system, a friend can get you a mailing list that forwards email for you, a student group or MIT employee can even maintain your account. (And also a somewhat hypocritical attitude on my part: if I wasn't staff, my account would be preserved by student group affiliation, and I doubt I'd abandon it.)

This begs the question: why does MIT bother? Is there some actual resource that's being recycled by deactivation and isn't growing faster than new accounts? Political-level implications of trying to be able to claim that only students and staff have accounts?

Comments

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

but we didn't licence zephyr - we wrote it ourselves.

[earthdragon.livejournal.com]

yes, but I/S does not give people different access to programs in general. It may be possible to make accounts that can only access free software, but they don't exist now. As you may have noticed, you can still have zephyr withouth an athena account, and I/S lets known sane people have shared keys with athena.