Necessary for other reasons as well

Post #244,526 by ben_tilly 2/14/06 10:56:41 AM Reply	Necessary for other reasons as well Let's think about a couple of important applications. Email. Email is pretty simple in principle. But I don't happen to want Todd to have access to my email. In other words the walls constructed by that application happen to be desireable for privacy reasons. Todd's work. I don't know about anyone else, but I think that a company that is going to handle credit cards and deliver actual stuff has an obligation to protect that data. Which means lots of walls that the provider wants for financial reasons. A web browser. Yeah, it would be great if we could just take the simple approach and let websites run whatever they want on your machine. Simple, powerful, and flexible. Unfortunately there are a bunch of people who want to run software on your machine that you don't want running software on your machine. And one of the biggest complaints about Internet Explorer is not that it has walls, but that it doesn't have effective walls to prevent that! I agree with Todd that a lot of programs could be made a lot nicer by making them expose more of how they work. And this is a vision that many people have tried to explore (eg it was the idea behind Microsoft's OLE). But it would generally be a bad idea to try to achieve it by removing the idea of applications entirely. Cheers, Ben I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
Post #244,544 by tuberculosis 2/14/06 1:15:51 PM Reply	There's a couple projects aimed at addressing security one is squeak-e - capability based security that lots of others are playing with. The other is something called islands - literally hunks of runtime/data with no references in or out. If you can't reach it you can mess with it. I'm not particularly well versed on these technologies but they are being addressed. Finally, you can get "walls" by running things in different VM's as they're just different unix processes. I'm not saying walls are bad - just that we've put a whole lot of them in stupid places (and not enough in others it seems). I think this horse is pretty much done. Fun discussion - thanks. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #244,547 by drewk 2/14/06 1:42:58 PM Reply	Bah, break for lunch and people go and end the discussion === Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link\|http://DocHope.com\|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats]. [link\|http://DocHope.com\|http://DocHope.com]
Post #244,566 by tuberculosis 2/14/06 3:09:58 PM Reply	I've made it back to the office - gotta catch up! "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #244,600 by boxley 2/14/06 7:22:35 PM Reply	email has walls? think again every keystroke in that message body travels thru multiple public points that have accesss to every keystroke. At the receiptiant end it sits on someone elses server who can read all of it until you pop it to your local machine. If you have delete server side after pop it is then (somewhat) safe on your machine unless upstream a pipe is being made to redirect copies. Email is about the most unsafe application available in use today. thanx, bill Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free american and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 50 years. meep
Post #244,601 by drewk 2/14/06 7:26:09 PM Reply	That's what client-side encryption is for === Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link\|http://DocHope.com\|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats]. [link\|http://DocHope.com\|http://DocHope.com]
Post #244,602 by ben_tilly 2/14/06 7:29:26 PM Reply	As far as most recipients are concerned, it does Don't believe me? Ask a secretary to read your email to you. Cheers, Ben I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
Post #244,609 by boxley 2/14/06 8:25:23 PM Reply	like windows, its the perception of security that counts Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free american and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 50 years. meep
Post #244,615 by ben_tilly 2/14/06 9:50:40 PM Reply	It is more complex than that People actively want slightly insecure systems. The classic example is our cars. Nobody wants their car to be broken into. But if any auto manufacturer produced cars that police officers etc can't break into after your key gets locked inside, you'd wind up with a lot of very pissed off people. That's why slim jims still work, even though it would be trivial to make a car that can't be broken into that way. Everyone knows that some very technical people can read their emails. Everyone knows that some bad people can likewise. But their friends and aquaintances can't, so they have reasonable privacy. And the capability for violation isn't a big issue - in fact if they develop email problems, they hope those same technical people will be able to use their control of the system to solve their problems. Cheers, Ben I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)

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