5 ms·

setuidgid is written in C. No bugs yet reported. Plan 9 doesn't have the concept of superuser. "sudo" is moot. Plan 9 is written in C. Just two examples th

setuidgid is written in C. No bugs yet reported. Plan 9 doesn't have the concept of superuser. "sudo" is moot. Plan 9 is written in C. Just two examples that come to mind. Maybe it's not the language. Maybe it's the person using it. There is never going to be a perfectly "idiot-proof" language that shares the power of a language like C. But many still seem to believe this is possible.

pnathan 14y ago
Better design alleviates the problem out of the gate, for a system-specific solution. But if our best solution is people gotta get smarter... man, I don't know what to say. As someone who supports ordinary programmers, expecting smarts is not the right track. expecting average and mistakes is the right track. If your foundation is not robust by default, your systems will not be robust by default either. To mix metaphors: Better to design foundations that keep the gloves on by default, then when you need to, take them off. You can see that design philosophy in Mercurial. Suppose - for argument's sake - that C had two different pointer types: checked pointers for arrays and unchecked pointers for arbitrary memory and that conversions between the two were relatively seamless. What difference would that make, 97% of the time?
- a3d6g2f7 14y ago
  Well, something like "privileges" seems like a design that is a holdover from a time of shared computing. We've adpated it for other uses, and for some people it's become some sort of security religion. If we assume it exists for the purpose of protecting users of the same computer from each other, it has no need to exist in most cases. Computers are affordable enough that we can all have our own. There is rarely necessity to share computing time. Plan 9 settled the issue. But sometimes I think some people have come to love the mental challenge of UNIX permissions. It is like a game to them. I made a function that produces all possible permissions for a file, including the nonsensical ones, so I could display permissions as octal instead of the usual ls format. Have you ever thought about how many possibilities there are? Too many. The setuid concept is interesting and must have seemed quite innovative at the time. Doesn't surprise me they filed a patent for it. But today, I could just as well do without the complexity.

pnathan 14y ago

Better design alleviates the problem out of the gate, for a system-specific solution. But if our best solution is people gotta get smarter... man, I don't know what to say. As someone who supports ordinary programmers, expecting smarts is not the right track. expecting average and mistakes is the right track. If your foundation is not robust by default, your systems will not be robust by default either. To mix metaphors: Better to design foundations that keep the gloves on by default, then when you need to, take them off. You can see that design philosophy in Mercurial. Suppose - for argument's sake - that C had two different pointer types: checked pointers for arrays and unchecked pointers for arbitrary memory and that conversions between the two were relatively seamless. What difference would that make, 97% of the time?

a3d6g2f7 14y ago
Well, something like "privileges" seems like a design that is a holdover from a time of shared computing. We've adpated it for other uses, and for some people it's become some sort of security religion. If we assume it exists for the purpose of protecting users of the same computer from each other, it has no need to exist in most cases. Computers are affordable enough that we can all have our own. There is rarely necessity to share computing time. Plan 9 settled the issue. But sometimes I think some people have come to love the mental challenge of UNIX permissions. It is like a game to them. I made a function that produces all possible permissions for a file, including the nonsensical ones, so I could display permissions as octal instead of the usual ls format. Have you ever thought about how many possibilities there are? Too many. The setuid concept is interesting and must have seemed quite innovative at the time. Doesn't surprise me they filed a patent for it. But today, I could just as well do without the complexity.