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

[Dan Gahlinger]

can you share it? I'd love to take a look at it

Dan.

________________________________
From: Simh <simh-bounces at trailing-edge.com> on behalf of Kevin Handy <khandy21yo at gmail.com>
Sent: March 30, 2020 2:17 AM
To: Hittner, David T [US] (MS) <david.hittner at ngc.com>
Cc: simh at trailing-edge.com <simh at trailing-edge.com>
Subject: Re: [Simh] EXT :Re: Releasing terspy.mar - vax/vms terminal spy program

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<mailto: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. :(



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. :)



David



From: Simh <simh-bounces at trailing-edge.com<mailto: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<mailto: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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