I think there are unwarrented assumptions about the motivation and character of sabotage software coders. 1- fame. An attack on Arachne would not happen because the market share is so small it wouldnt make the news.
2- money. Back when Microsoft had XP ready, they laid off lots of programmers, many of whom were not happy, and left with bits of code they knew about. Some of them have been hired by the Linux distro people to craft windows sabotage, and some of them are motivated by revenge as well. Management that is unethical outside of the corporate structure cannot then be ethical inside, although they certainly pretend that they are loyal and honorable to staff. Pandering to the 'us vs them' mentality diminishes the ability to see the needs of outsiders, in this case, customers. >From the standpoint of the personal desktop, the less hidden functionality the better, and so far, dos/arachne is the most transparent browser setup I know about. If it were up to me, I break it down even further, and have arachne as only a gui browser, with the news and email functionality based on other apps like NETTAMER, and all of them running on a ppp driver like LSPPP. The modularization makes it more clear what is being passed from one app to another, and thereby simpler to setup firewalls between them. Given the size of dram these days, there's no reason that .html cannot be run on a ram disk, with no access at all to the hard drive. Much of what is going on these days is like cars in the late 50's, gas hogs, plastered with chrome, but lacking in any real functionality improvements. If I want full motion video, I can download it, and dont need it spread all over webpages just so the webmaster can appear up to date to his boss.
