[Simh] EXT :Re: Releasing terspy.mar - vax/vms terminal spy program

[Kevin Handy]

I found a program on an old gcc distribution called gcobs.mar. Dom't know
why they had it on there. but...

It allows you to spy on another terminal, and if you type a ^\ (iirc) you
can interact with that terminal. The only authorship message I can see is
;Last Modified:   6-SEP-1988 14:19:55.00, By: RLB
I know nothing of its licensing, I just have this one file. It worked
great. Not sure what privs are required either.

On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 9:04 AM Hittner, David T [US] (MS) <
david.hittner at ngc.com> wrote:

> Oh no… management frequently asked VMS admins to ‘spy’ on general users
> for a few reasons back in the day, before the politically-correct era.
>
> -          Make sure users were not defrauding the company [stealing
> inventory with illegal transactions, etc.]  (without user consent)
>
> -          Watch user sessions when managers reported various discipline
> problems (without user consent)
>
> -          Debugging full-screen application behavior from a remote
> location by having the user walk us through what they did (with user
> consent)
>
>
>
> SET HOST/LOG sessions are difficult to use to see where full-screen
> applications went wrong, since you have to manually interpret all of the
> logged VT escape sequences. L
>
>
>
> For a while, there was a company selling a SPY utility for VMS, as well as
> freebie versions floating around. The commercial version allowed the
> watcher to enter data in the watched session by using a special command
> sequence to enable remote data entry. I don’t recall any of the freebie
> versions ever allowing data entry from the watcher, for fairly obvious
> security reasons.
>
>
>
> There was also another highly privileged program on the DECUS tapes,
> GLOGIN, which allowed a privileged user to login as another user, so that
> you could see what application behavior occurred within the context of a
> specific user. I found a weird bug in one of our application programs that
> only occurred when the username was *exactly* 7 characters long using
> GLOGIN to login as the user who had reported the bug that we couldn’t
> duplicate ourselves. J
>
>
>
> David
>
>
>
> *From:* Simh <simh-bounces at trailing-edge.com> *On Behalf Of *Robert
> Armstrong
> *Sent:* Wednesday, March 25, 2020 10:23 AM
> *To:* simh at trailing-edge.com
> *Subject:* EXT :Re: [Simh] Releasing terspy.mar - vax/vms terminal spy
> program
>
>
>
> >$ SET HOST/LOG will log your own session. This program logs someone
> else's session.
>
>
>
>   That’s true – I’m assuming the person being spied upon wants to be spied
> on.
>
>
>
> Bob
>
>
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