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Malicious applications and internet malware weren't raging problems in the late 90s, but they were known and predicted dangers. You really don't need "user acc

Malicious applications and internet malware weren't raging problems in the late 90s, but they were known and predicted dangers. You really don't need "user accounts" per se, but a way to restrict process privileges, of which user accounts is just a decent abstraction. On WinNT, user accounts and groups are just abstractions for providing SIDs for your access token -- there are SIDs like NT SYSTEM which don't have a correlated user account. The important bit is you can create a process that can't accidentally fandango on core and overwrite all the system files. You have to elevate privileges -- even if there's no prompt for the user, the application dev still has to intentionally request admin rights to touch sensitive files. All that aside, though, it's a lot easier to fake "no user accounts" like Windows did and just have no password, than to genuinely have no privilege separation and try to retrofit it on later. If you're trying to market a brand new OS with new APIs that has no compatibility with anything, even in the 90s, I'd expect some kind of plan for at least optional security. Anything at all!

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> You really don't need "user accounts" per se, but a way to restrict process privileges, of which user accounts is just a decent abstraction I contend that they really aren't. > The important bit is you can create a process that can't accidentally fandango on core and overwrite all the system files. And here's why: the system files are easily replicable, there's a copy on every OS installation media. My personal files exist in far fewer places and the OS does absolutely nothing to stop a malicious application from damaging them. See also: https://xkcd.com/1200/ https://xkcd.com/1200/ We call them user accounts because they are designed around isolating users from each other and the system, but that isn't what we care about in a personal computing context. It is possible to jerry-rig the kind of permission system we actually want using the user account system, but it has a lot of problems in practice because it isn't designed for that. It is not a good abstraction.
- spijdar 6y ago
  Yeah, I'll concede that "decent" is too much credit. Even on "true multi user systems" the simplistic models *nix don't really work, and you end up seeing people using combinations of virtual machines and containers as ham-fisted sandboxes. I was thinking of it more along the lines that it's at least kind of understandable for the average person. More so than some alternatives, at least. Still, I think it was a big oversight to provide nothing at all in BeOS. Maybe they could have come up with a better solution than the backwards-compatible status quo. Or maybe personal computers would have just been better off in an alternate timeline where networking wasn't as pervasive and we still got software on disks, and mailed off for a hard copy of GNU...

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

> You really don't need "user accounts" per se, but a way to restrict process privileges, of which user accounts is just a decent abstraction I contend that they really aren't. > The important bit is you can create a process that can't accidentally fandango on core and overwrite all the system files. And here's why: the system files are easily replicable, there's a copy on every OS installation media. My personal files exist in far fewer places and the OS does absolutely nothing to stop a malicious application from damaging them. See also: https://xkcd.com/1200/ https://xkcd.com/1200/ We call them user accounts because they are designed around isolating users from each other and the system, but that isn't what we care about in a personal computing context. It is possible to jerry-rig the kind of permission system we actually want using the user account system, but it has a lot of problems in practice because it isn't designed for that. It is not a good abstraction.

spijdar 6y ago
Yeah, I'll concede that "decent" is too much credit. Even on "true multi user systems" the simplistic models *nix don't really work, and you end up seeing people using combinations of virtual machines and containers as ham-fisted sandboxes. I was thinking of it more along the lines that it's at least kind of understandable for the average person. More so than some alternatives, at least. Still, I think it was a big oversight to provide nothing at all in BeOS. Maybe they could have come up with a better solution than the backwards-compatible status quo. Or maybe personal computers would have just been better off in an alternate timeline where networking wasn't as pervasive and we still got software on disks, and mailed off for a hard copy of GNU...