Alan Burlison wrote:
> Somewhere between one and four hours seems like a reasonable time for 
> the inactivity logout, 

What are the statistics on the cookie stealing incidents we are experiencing?
What was their explicit impact? Their potential impact? 
(i.e., is this a theoretical or real problem?)

> re-supply their passwords when doing any 
> security-critical operations such as registering a new SSH key or 
> changing their password

Yahoo & google force password entry at other points as well - effectively, 
if it has been "too long" since you reauth'd, any "change my info" operation 
triggers one - where too long is (IIRC) between several hours and 2 weeks.

I don't expect most people will be doing activities on the site as often as
you presume (between one and four hours) - while *some* people live on os.o,
I would guess that the vast majority revisit on a daily or weekly (or longer)
basis. [this would be a good place for some real data]

(I get my os.o email in Thunderbird or via GMail, I do most of my interactions
with genunix's wiki and hg; I hit up OS.o with my browser only infrequently,
daily to a couple of times a week. I'd be pretty turned off if I was forced to
relogin every one of those times.)

II predict that an inactivity logout of less than a week or so would be a 
huge dissatisfier for the majority of casual OS.o users.

> although this will of course be configurable.

As long as it can be set to things like "2 weeks", "1 month" or even "never"...

  -John


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