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

[Dan T. <da...@ar...>]

> For what does one need administration rights?  To access the
> Registry and other protected directories!  Well, all of that is
> unnecessary.
Only HKLM and secured directories - which games shouldn't be dealing with
anyway. Same deal with any other OS. It'd be absurd for a game to require
root on a linux box to play, wouldn't it? Yet you should be able to put
games in /bin (I forget where it is under linux) or /Program Files and
expect them to play for all users. Doesn't work with preferences in the exe
directory.

> 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.
Still doesn't address the need for write access, which is why I personally
shelved that thought.

> 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.
Dear god, no. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I'd be pretty irritated at
having to put a password at everything I do. Of course, you *could* get
around that by saving your password somewhere and having the OS do it for
you... that sounds familiar. Or you could be lazy (like people are) and just
use the same password for everything. Which we all know is very secure.

> 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 then you want every application to support a robust security system?

> 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.
I don't pay a whole lot of attention (I'm behind a firewall, and I keep up
on updates), but generally I see *applications* getting compromised, then
the fact that they are running under Admin access causes problems. Since you
want the applications to run their own security, this problem is in no way
solved.

-Dan

>
> --- Colin
>
> cp...@ea...
>
>
>
>
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