Re: strange message in gnome-terminal

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 09:17:53AM +0100 or thereabouts, Francesco Marletta wrote:
> Hi to all,
> I was finish translating gnome-terminal when I found the following message
> I didn't understand what it stands for.
> 
> #: src/gnome-terminal.schemas.in.h:108
> msgid "Support skey dingus clicking"
> 
> Can someone help me?

I think I can. I just explained this to Arafat the other day.
He was going to file a bug. I don't know whether he did. 

In summary, treat "skey" as the name of a program; and 
"dingus-clicking" as an evil made-up phrase to be hidden:
it refers to clicking on URLs in gnome-terminal and a
browser opening. (Generally. But read on.)

Here's the full story, because there are probably other
people wondering about this too. I know I did.

* "dingus" is an English word for some thing you can't
think of the name for: "thing", "thingy", "wotsit", 
"what-do-you-call-it".

* "dingus-clicking" is what you do when you see an underlined
URL in gnome-terminal and you click the mouse button on it
and get the web site or whatever it is appearing.

"Dingus-clicking" is _not_, as far as I know, Approved Gnome
Terminology according to the HIG and the docs writing guidelines.
I don't think we're supposed to use it anywhere user-visible.

Nat Friedman (I think?) wrote the code for this "highlight
a URL and open a browser on it" facility for a different
terminal emulator altogether. When Gnome started, someone
added it to gnome-terminal. It was there in gnome-terminal-1.0.
(And it started working in gnome-terminal-1.0.52 :)) 

And it has grown a bit in gnome-terminal. It recognises
"www.", "https://";, "ftp." and some other things. One of
those other things is "s/key". 

Right, skey!

* skey is a program used to work out what your one-time
password (or passphrase) is. 

Some systems will not only let you only with ssh, they
also don't want you sending your password over the network.
They use one-time passwords.

And when you do "ssh user@secure.host.com" in a terminal, and
secure.host.com has this one-time password thing set up, then 
you get a different response from normal. 

You don't get "user@secure.host.com's password:"

You get: 

  S/key one time passwords are in effect.
  Challenge: s/key 1234 sec98765
  Please enter s/key response:

If you are reading this in a text-mailer in gnome-terminal,
mouse over that middle line. Look! It will be highlighted
and you can click on it. (Don't yet, not for a minute.)

Now then, _normally_ you would take that middle line about
s/key 9876 sec12345 (or whatever: it changes with every
login attempt), feed it into a magic program for figuring 
out what your password is today, which will be valid for
this one login only, and then type that one-time-password 
in at the prompt in the final line.

The program which takes your password and figures out your
one-time-password (or passphrase) should be kept on a secure 
machine (apparently people typically use PDAs), obviously. 
And one of the programs which can tell you your passphrase 
is called... skey. 

Aha. We're getting there :) 

But go back to the login prompt and that "Challenge" line.
If you are not using gnome-terminal, you can cut and paste
that line into a gnome-terminal to test this.

Instead of feeding that middle line to another machine
or program to get your magic phrase-of-the-day, if you click 
on the highlighted underlined text, you get a dialogue box 
which is an interface to a program which will do it for you. 

So you type in your _normal password_ to that dialogue box.
The program behind it can see the s/key challenge and the
numbers it has produced this time. And that program figures 
out your one-time password or phrase for the day and 
feeds it to the machine waiting for it. And you can log in.
The dialogue box goes away and you can go back to your
gnome-terminal having had the login happen automatically.
(I assume. I don't use one-time passwords myself, so I
have never actually seen What Happens Next for real :))

So all of this is useful for about 0.00001% of the 
computers in the entire world, at a rough guess, but that 
0.00001% presumably includes the person who wrote the s/key 
recognition into gnome-terminal. Stand up, Jon Blandford!

How in the name of goodness you translate all that into
the brief description for gconf, I have absolutely no idea.

But "skey" is a recognised program (and perhaps a protocol,
or specification? I dunno) and should be left alone. And
"dingus-clicking" is evil and should not be there in the
English, let alone anywhere else. 

I suggest perhaps you treat the message as meaning
"Highlight skey challenges" instead of what it says
now. Don't translate "skey" because it's a program. 
And translate "challenge" with whatever noun you would
use when talking about "challenge-response" systems.

It's not at all what the string says, but I think it 
is what the string means (Jon: yes? no?). And it might
be easier to translate that way.

And if Arafat hasn't opened a bug, then I shall :) 

Telsa

PS I apologise for the horrible length of this :(