-- Nicolas Williams wrote: > The text you quote doesn't answer the question; the > rest of the wiki frontpage says little more. It tends > to make me think that if an application wants to do > something that I've not enabled it to do ahead of time > then it fails. Failure is incovenient. So as near as > I can tell from the text you quote BitFrost sets its > convenience/security parameters differently than other > OSes, but there's nothing truly Earth shatteringly new > there.
There is a great deal that is earth shatteringly new, and it is documented - albeit in rather unclear and non standard format. The fundamental difference is that each application is run in its own VM, and so *cannot* exercise full user powers, whereas with *all* other OSs, if your solitaire game is a trojan, or (more likely) has flaws that enable an adversary to get control of it, it can read all your user documents and mail them to the adversary, check your interaction with the browser to detect you typing in passwords to your bank account and share trading account, get the names of everyone on your address list, and spam cons and trojans to them in each others names, use your modem to dial a ten dollar a minute gay S&M sex line in Outer Mongolia, launch a denial of service attack against The Gold Casino as part of an extortion scheme, spray ads onto your screen, make your system a file share server for other people's child pornography, and report all your video files to the copyright lawyers. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG x4p2u5+Go3URK4IvzoJkO/+K0lr4p4XW2aNmlbEi 4dlOW8vAN4GsnWBzDGfvyjQYPosBfDEqrH3rKQ451 --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]