Posts by Doctor Syntax 42414 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Let's consider a possible example. At some point the US CLOUD Act is going to raise problems with GDPR because any US corporation is vulnerable. One way round it would be for those US corporation would be to go hands-off and allow European companies to run European bit-barns using the corporation's IP including branding. It could be a purely IP-based operation.
"50+% of graduates now in NON graduate level work"
That was inevitable as soon as Blair decided that he wanted 50% of youngsters to go to University. There were never going to be that proportion of jobs at graduate level but it reduced youth unemployment figures and, as was the principle of all Blair/Brown financial shenanigans, hid the immediate costs by deferring them to future decades, in this case by student loans.
"For example, some heart medications that work on Caucasians will kill Africans."
Can you be more specific, especially as to mechanism? If this is the case it's more likely to be a consequence of some specific allele. The risk would be correlated with some specific aspect of the patient's ancestry but a more sensible approach would be to test for that allele rather than make some judgement based on what the patient looks like.
Sales and marketing types habitually assume that the public will readily click on links or open files received from random unknown strangers (not that said marketing types have the self-awareness to realise they're random unknown strangers). I can only assume that expectation comes from their being willing to do the same and, in fact, here we have them reading files, cookies, from random unknown strangers relying on the belief that these are the files they planted themselves. So don't bother with just replying with an oversized payload of random stuff. Send them something really nasty.
"I also considered the unpleasant scenario of being killed during international travel and the challenge of identifying my body until someone found a pair of glasses to shove on my dead face."
Depending on circumstances glasses might be the least of their difficulties.
It depends on what balance you want to achieve. Traditionally performance requirements have dominated. The result seems to have been at the expense of security. Is that the right balance now? As H/W gets faster should the balance change? Could we reduce the performance penalty, at least in user-facing systems, by cutting down on UI bloat?
Whether micro-kernels are the way to achieve it or not (and possibly they might be) I think there's a need from the security PoV to move away from the idea of an all-powerful root user. The MO of a lot of exploits is privilege escalation.
The functions of root need to be split. One function would be to allocate user IDs. Another would be to allocate storage space. A third would install applications. None of them would have the ability to read or write anything other than what they need to do. If an application needs to access file space it should do so in a space allocated for that particular application or at most a class of applications.
Instead of calling a common kernel service an office application, for instance, would call an office data storage service with some means of checking that the client was a registered office storage client in addition to the check that the user had access rights according to user, group or public settings* with nobody else.
The storage service might even be able to check file format. It might provide versioning. What it wouldn't do would be to provide read access to some malware trying to exfiltrate data or hold the data to ransom. Such malware would not only have to impersonate the user but also the application.
This division of responsibilities might have a performance impact but that would be the cost of security. As things are we currently see security being sold cheap in terms of convenience and performance. It needs to be given a higher value.
* Or some other ACL
The whole of S/W development (and that includes micro-code in processors) is about abstracting the real bits in the computer into some form that's easier for the user to grasp. If that were not the case we'd still be writing programs in machine code.
AIUI he hasn't. He's just taken "everything is a file" and changed it to "everything is a URL". It extends "everything" to include stuff not on the physical computer. Whether or not this is a good idea is debatable. It assumes that the computer is on-line and if it isn't there must be a lot of URL equivalents of "file not found".
"This leads to absurd situations like the hard disk containing the root filesystem / contains a folder named dev with device files including sda which contains the root filesystem."
I suppose one way round that would be to mount dev on /..
Back before the internet became commonplace The Newcastle Connection had the network at /..
"That's the companies sale"
And that, folks, is the main point to remember. It's exactly the same as the biggest outsourcing company you can think of. Sales rate is not the same as the rate paid to whoever's doing the job The biggest differences are: lower day rate then them, less overheads and, it seems a much greater interest in doing a good job for the client because the sales and marketing staff are the same as the delivery staff.
Yup. It's always the same. You get that sort of comment and think "Are they really Goody Two-shoes?". They don't have the balls to try it themselves, in fact they're so far from doing it that they haven't really looked at the details so they're completely uninformed about the realities. Dogs & mangers come to mind. Or sour grapes.
