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while unrestricted computing devices can used by those who are learning You can have a machine where you are actually more free to experiment than simply being
by stcredzero 9y ago
while unrestricted computing devices can used by those who are learning
You can have a machine where you are actually more free to experiment than simply being unrestricted. If you have a machine where you can roll back changes to a saved point, you are more free to experiment, even with dangerous and esoteric mechanisms. This is what we had in Smalltalk. Smalltalk used to be an OS. (There are 4 hooks in the old Smalltalk-80 image for lifting the drive head, putting it down, and moving it in and out.) When I used it, it was no longer an OS, but this is how I know that doing
Semaphore allInstances do: [ :each | each release ]
Locks up your image so hard, there's often lag when you try to kill the VM process. I can do that with un-checked in code in the image, then restart from a saved image, replay all of my actions from the change log except for the last one, and I'm back in seconds, all of my code nice and safe.
This degree of rollback ability would also be great for simplifying parental IT. You'd need to add some sort of cloud storage for storage of authentication secrets and the most important data, but then it would be almost bulletproof.
- blibble 9y agoa chromebook?
- stcredzero 9y agoIs the Chromebook's rollback as absolute as, say, that of a device running a Smalltalk based OS in a 'kiosk' mode with a hypervisor overseeing the VM and recovery mode?
- swdunlop 9y agoNo, but it comes with a popular browser?
- mynewtb 9y agoThe cloud has no rollback nor should the billions of people not have privacy.
- stcredzero 9y agoThe cloud has no rollback That's the whole point of having certain things in the cloud! nor should the billions of people not have privacy You can have a relatively open machine that implements rollback mechanisms using local storage and have privacy just fine. Did you just have a reading comprehension failure?
- Terretta 9y agoOr in Linux with Nix and NixOS.
- concede_pluto 9y agoRollback is quite appealing but it does leave a window during which malware can exfiltrate your private info before you pave over it.
- stcredzero 9y agoControversially, at least for these circles, I also advocate Trusted Execution as a tool for personal security and the protection of personal information. In the hands of corporations and governments, imposed on individuals, this becomes DRM and is clearly horrible. It's so horrible, there should be laws heavily regulating it's use by organizations against individuals. However, the same asymmetries that make the issues of disclosure and privacy different between corporations and individuals also make trusted execution different between corporations and individuals. It's bad for society and individuals when individuals have their information disseminated against their will. However it's very good for society when corporations, governments, and other organizations are required to be open and disclose information. This is why Trusted Execution should be used by individuals against organizations. Aimed in that direction, it compensates for the power differential. Used as DRM, it exacerbates it. Trusted Execution combined with sandboxing can provide individuals with very good protection against things like malware and the Sony rootkit. My ideal PC would have an inviolate hypervisor kernel supervising an open "dev" VM which can be rolled back, along with various "appliance" VMs where sandboxes with Trusted Execution can protect the individual from the execution of other people's code.