[zeugma]

And with any reasonable number of users, at least one user would have a trivial password (this was before there was any built-in enforcement of password complexity). A colleague of mine wrote a snooper program that examined the passwd file for trivial passwords, and reported the results to him. He was continually uncovering trivial, and therefore, easily hackable, passwords.

I'll have to assume that this was a while ago, as all modern unixes that I know use the /etc/shadow file rather than storing the password in the /etc/passwd file.  

Permissions on /etc/shadow is 000 ...

ls -al /etc/shad*
----------  1 root root 2665 2010-11-11 14:24 /etc/shadow
----------. 1 root root 2543 2010-11-04 11:39 /etc/shadow-

Without already having an exploit, it would be kind of difficult to get at.

You're right that early versions of Unix were much more loose permission-wise on many files and directories. Fortunately, as the environment became more hostile, it was much easier to secure the environment because it was based on the premise of multiple users in the first place. Microsoft had to start from a single-user system that essentially had no permissions granularity at all to something more secure, and the world has felt the pain of some of the architectural desisions they made during the process.

[Erasmus]

I'll have to assume that this was a while ago

Yeah, most of my Unix dealings were from '78 to about '85.

Microsoft had to start from a single-user system that essentially had no permissions granularity at all to something more secure, and the world has felt the pain of some of the architectural desisions they made during the process.

And I feel that pain every time I try to fix up the functionality of my W/XP and Vista file sharing here at the shack.