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It's the operating system's job to protect itself from userland, as well as to protect userland from other userlands. It's generally not its job to protect your

It's the operating system's job to protect itself from userland, as well as to protect userland from other userlands. It's generally not its job to protect your documents from your applications. Normal people don't worry about malware rooting their OS. Normal people worry about malware ruining their un-backuped photos and work docs, something that few operating systems dare protect users from. (Which is why the iOS model of computer security is IMO a sleeper breakthrough, and why I always always recommend iPads/Chromebooks to people I wouldn't trust to not download Comet Cursor.)

dredmorbius 9y ago
Except that we went through this in the 1990s and: 1. Highly-interactive, programmatic, cross-connected documents were (security-wise) a Very Bad Thing. 2. Secure systems divorced viewing of documents from either editing them or running code. Mostly. Windows didn't do this, and ended up with massive security issues, but the systems were largely not massively interconnected. Yes, they were on business LANs, and yes, there were connections to some other systems (largely through email), but not today's "everything is on the Web and you're connecting to 100s or 1,000s of remote sites daily". Unix systems, generally, did enforce separation. They were also typically more interconnected (remote filesystems, ftp, telnet, early SSH, early Web), but there was some sanity in data/code separation. Unix systems could produce and view Postscript and PDF documents. Windows systems ... mostly couldn't. If you wanted to view a Word document, you either printed it out, or you opened it in MS Word. Microsoft did, yes, make a read-only viewer application. If you tried to, say, scroll through a document by hitting the spacebar, it would pop up a dialog telling you you couldn't edit the document. Every. Fucking. Time. You. Hit. Space. I nuked that mofo so fast. "less" with catdoc or mswordview worked well enough for me. I'm not claiming that 1990s Unix / Linux systems had sufficient process/data separation or sandboxing for today's network environments. They didn't (and we've got the scars to show for it). But they were following a more appropriate tack, and did in general foster environments where documents weren't openly dangerous. (Again: mostly, there were exceptions, but they also pushed limits and took things in directions that weren't generally intended by the software designers, in sharp contrast to Windows.)

dredmorbius 9y ago

Except that we went through this in the 1990s and: 1. Highly-interactive, programmatic, cross-connected documents were (security-wise) a Very Bad Thing. 2. Secure systems divorced viewing of documents from either editing them or running code. Mostly. Windows didn't do this, and ended up with massive security issues, but the systems were largely not massively interconnected. Yes, they were on business LANs, and yes, there were connections to some other systems (largely through email), but not today's "everything is on the Web and you're connecting to 100s or 1,000s of remote sites daily". Unix systems, generally, did enforce separation. They were also typically more interconnected (remote filesystems, ftp, telnet, early SSH, early Web), but there was some sanity in data/code separation. Unix systems could produce and view Postscript and PDF documents. Windows systems ... mostly couldn't. If you wanted to view a Word document, you either printed it out, or you opened it in MS Word. Microsoft did, yes, make a read-only viewer application. If you tried to, say, scroll through a document by hitting the spacebar, it would pop up a dialog telling you you couldn't edit the document. Every. Fucking. Time. You. Hit. Space. I nuked that mofo so fast. "less" with catdoc or mswordview worked well enough for me. I'm not claiming that 1990s Unix / Linux systems had sufficient process/data separation or sandboxing for today's network environments. They didn't (and we've got the scars to show for it). But they were following a more appropriate tack, and did in general foster environments where documents weren't openly dangerous. (Again: mostly, there were exceptions, but they also pushed limits and took things in directions that weren't generally intended by the software designers, in sharp contrast to Windows.)