Re: A Few Ideas

[Stefan Skoglund <stetson ebox tninet se>]

At 10:57 1998-09-21 -0600, you wrote:
>Sounds exciting.
>
>> I think NEXTSTEP is the ideal existing model for what we want to do. It
>> was powerful, it was buzzword-compliant, it was Unix, but you never had to
>> touch a shell to do anything unless you really wanted to (and with the
>> great graphic designers they had, who would want to?)
>
>Perhaps so.  Thanks for your careful commentary.
>

Hmm, personally i want single-sign-on ie the box should start xdm at boot-time
and all applications should be able to do their job in an safe manner even
if i occasionally runs unknown java programs, downloads wordprocessor
documents with embedded macro viruses and so on.

What do this entails :
Only applications with the proper authentications should be able to
do super-user operations and only the user with super-user privileges
should be able to run thoose programs at their full performance.

Normal users should be able to run exactly the same programs to.
Visualize a tool for managing networ interfaces. The superuser should
be able to change ipfw settings, killing network interfaces, changing IP
addresses
and so on. Normal users  could use the same program to check out performance
ie speed, collisions and so.

Nasty macro-viruses should be unable to start that program at all.
And they should especially not be able to access anything which sensitive.

And all theese different programs should be able to coexist at the same X11
display. Something like this probably requires authentication features very
different from UNIX.