Still alive, if anyone was wondering#

Mon, 08 Apr 2002 00:22:42 +0000

Still alive, if anyone was wondering.

FTX13 didn't happen, and I expect will be continuing to not happen in future months (a total of two people commented on its nonappearance). It was dull to write, it was probably dull to read. With any luck the forthcoming Yadda Lambda should be more interesting. Personal opinions (which are, frankly, a good deal more fun to talk about anyway) continue to be opined here as and when.

OxLUG meeting today; Russell Coker talked on the NSA's Security-Enhanced Linux (and here). Interesting stuff. Per-process security domains are neat, but of course mean that you have to split stuff up into many Unix processes to get any advantage from it; a single proicess running Lisp that starts life at boot time is not going to be helped by this. Sigh. Unix is a bad fit for the traditional Common Lisp model. And vice versa. Do we think that eventually Unixheads will figure out some sane way to let a process gain and relinquish privileges withing exec()ing anything (apparently the Hurd can do this. Does anyone use the Hurd?) or do we think that each of the two communities will use this as further evidence that the other has a basically misguided outloook?

So, yes, the separate-memory-space processes-invoked-by-exec() Unix model is limiting: let's face it, (string) is not an adequately rich library of data types to build reliable systems by composing Unix "components". On the other hand, there is a clear need in today's systems for protecting one process from another, and there's presently nothing better than the Unix model for doing this. Anyone who claims that the lisp package system is capable of this is welcome to give me an account on their system and let me try to break it. ssh public key available on request.