UMD IS has turned off the ability for remote users to "finger" users on our system.

This decision was based upon two issues, performance and privacy.

Before turning off the finger command, our machine was doing a lot of work servicing large numbers of finger requests from site off campus. On our system finger is a very expensive (resource intensive) service because of the very large number of users we have on our system. Finger service may not be a performance issue on other systems where the number of users is much smaller.

The other issue is privacy. We have had users harassed on-line by otherwise unknown folks on the Internet. The harasser's used finger service to find out information about who was logged on.

There is no requirement for sites on the internet to provide finger service. If a user is trying to find the appropiate email address of a user, they should type use

finger firstname.lastname@umn.edu

e.g.

finger john.jones@umn.edu

This will return public data on the person, including their email address. [an error occurred while processing this directive]
Last Revised on 12/17/97 fs [an error occurred while processing this directive]