Re: [email] RE: [GD-General] A portable preferences library

[Colin F. <cp...@ea...>]

2003 December 4th
Thursday

For what does one need administration rights?  To access the 
Registry and other protected directories!  Well, all of that is
unnecessary.

And as far as patching is concerned...  How do people acquire
patches today?  The application itself acquires its own patches!
I won't go in to the details of how an application can acquire
its own patches and somehow not interefere with the application
during the acquisition process, but I think it's pretty evident
that this is easy.

What huge binary "preference" might the user have?  Couldn't this
go in the application directory, too?

As far as my comment about multi-user systems being an antiquated
concept, I stand by it, but I need to qualify it.  I envision 
decentralizing all security and preferences; these things become
the responsibility of individual resources in cooperation with 
the operating system.  For example, you could set the "desktop"
to "Bob's" preferences, and access one of "Joe's" folders, and
launch a media player with "Jane's" preferences.  There is no
user logged in to the console, just a cloud of resources with 
various security mechanisms.

Right now it is possible for me to create a ZIP archive that is
protected by a password.  Even if a hacker compromises my computer
and gains access to the ZIP archive, it is pure junk to the hacker.
Just expand the idea to everything about the operating system and
all applications.

So a computer may have many users, but the idea of *being* a user
on a system and automatically gaining access to resources that 
you own is obsolete.  Too often the big gatekeeper (e.g., the 
Windows operating system) is compromised.  Security needs to 
be decentralized.

--- Colin

cp...@ea...