Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Yet another post about stupid Operating Systems

Here's an interesting take on just how bad our reliance on stupid operating systems has made things... it could happen any day now.
The thing that continues to drive me crazy about this is that while all this stuff is possible, becoming probable over time, it doesn't have to be this way. No amount of "cybersecurity" in the world can fix the actual root cause... our Operating Systems are stupid... they require you to trust any program you run, and don't offer any tools to limit the scope of what a program can do.
Imagine the power grid with no circuit breakers what so ever... this is what Windows, MacOS, Linux etc all do, as well as all the embedded Internet of Things devices we're buying by the millions. They blindly trust every line of code you tell them to run, or that they auto-run when you insert a USB stick, etc.
Operating Systems exist (but are not mainstream), like Genode (which I still don't have running on my laptop... any year now....grrrr), which offer a way do securely run things, the key to this magic non-stupid OS?.... it simply asks which files you want to let a program use, and never blindly trusts anything. The thing doesn't have to be any less user friendly either... Word could just use the file you chose, instead of asking you and doing it itself.
I figure about 10 more years until this type of OS goes mainstream... I keep mentioning it every chance I get... a low level PR campaign to fix cybersecurity for once and for all.

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