Praise for the humble wallet.

 I have a wallet, it was given to me, it is a good, but worn wallet.  I keep money, ID, and a few important pieces of data in it.  The technology of the wallet has yet to be replicated on my computer.

You see, I can take money from my wallet, and hand it to another person, and they could put it in their wallet... they could just run away with it... but the largest amount they could cause to be lost from my wallet was decided by me, in advance, at my discretion.

On this spiffy computer, however... there is no wallet, nothing comes close.  There is no way for me to take a file, and give access to that file to a program, without giving that program access to everything that the computer associates with me. There is no way for me, in advance, at my discretion, to trust only a limited and carefully chosen subset of what is in my computer, to a program.

You can't do it on Linux, you can't do it on a Mac, you can't do it in Windows.

*A technically savvy person could point out that he could tell the computer not to allow access to everything but that file... but that's hardly the same thing, is it? I don't require a skilled banker to limit which notes I pull from my wallet, why should I require a system manager to do the simple task of picking a file?

This is, in my mind, collective insanity.

I have hope, however... in a few years, a system which has been in the works for a long time, called Genode will be available which actually lets you decide what you want to do with your computer, without the programs you run being able to override that decision, or get confused, and lose your data.

Until then, here's to the humble wallet, a technology not matched by the latest products of silicon valley!