how to get rid of the request of typing in password

[Avi Greenbury]

Ric Moore wrote:

> It's 30 year+ accumulated wisdom that is being passed onto you. If you
> can get in without a password, so can everyone else. 

Only everybody else with physical access. This is moot in many places,
most of which *nix hasn't really been in for much of the last 30 years.
In fact, most of those 30 years of password related wisdom relate to
telnet and *sh - he's probably being even more secure by just not
running those services.

> Then God only knows what potential damage your machine could be made
> to do to the rest of the Internet, and not only to your machine. It's
> never a good idea. 

On the contrary, it's frequently not a bad one at all. The sorts of
people inflicting damage across the internet are not, in the main,
doing it by breaking into peoples' houses, logging on to their PC and
installing a script.

Once an attacker's got physical access, it hardly matters what user
they've got access to notionally; they can just reset root's password in
little longer than it takes to reboot.

If they've not got physical access, it doesn't matter that Gnome logs
in without a password, because they're not getting in through Gnome.


-- 
Avi