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Unix by far is not secure. Access control via unix permissions is a mess, this is why we have selinux, apparmor, smack... The whole 'complexity' argument is moot todays unix with selinux, chrooting, jails, apparmor is much more complex than say a capability based security.
ACL's are not even close to what selinux, apparmor, and smack are trying to accomplish.
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As an engineer (though admittedly one at Microsoft), Steve Jobs seems like he'd be a /horrible/ boss. All appearances suggest that he doesn't care about good engineering, but rather that he cares about good user experience, damn the torpedoes.
Ballmer certainly looks like a great boss, having great care for good engineering practices such as yelling, throwing chairs at people and being generally obnoxious. Also, user experience is a part of good engineering.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Steve-Jobs-Not-Shy-of-Using-t...
we can both play this game all day.
user experience is indeed a part of good engineering, but it's not the be-all and end-all, and eventually you will /always/ run into a place where you must compromise between a system which is well-engineered and one that behaves in accordance with user expectation.
this is why OS X doesn't have full ASLR and DEP, because it can cause applications to start crashing at random because they were poorly written in a way that used to be invisible.
this is why UAC on Windows Vista is a terrible experience, because even trusted applications need to prompt the user to make sure they approve of them executing on an administrator token.
this is why our operating systems still have to reboot while applying security updates, because long-running services and the kernel have to be replaced and there's no good way to do it seamlessly yet.
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It’s possible some people might believe that, perhaps not HN readers But the quality of the management plays a very important role in the quality of the end result: Apples has Jobs and Microsoft has Ballmer. So Microsoft is at a disadvantage human-resource-wise.
As an engineer (though admittedly one at Microsoft), Steve Jobs seems like he'd be a /horrible/ boss. All appearances suggest that he doesn't care about good engineering, but rather that he cares about good user experience, damn the torpedoes.
I know a fair few people at Microsoft, and elsewhere, and I've never seen evidence that the engineering talent distribution at Apple is really all that different from the talent distribution anywhere else. There are superstars and dolts in the expected proportions.
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As an engineer (though admittedly one at Microsoft), Steve Jobs seems like he'd be a /horrible/ boss. All appearances suggest that he doesn't care about good engineering, but rather that he cares about good user experience, damn the torpedoes.
As a former Apple engineer, I can confidently say that, while Jobs is the putative boss of everyone in the company, 99.9% of Apple engineers will never cross paths with him. I know a fair few people at Microsoft, and elsewhere, and I've never seen evidence that the engineering talent distribution at Apple is really all that different from the talent distribution anywhere else. There are superstars and dolts in the ex…
that said, Steve Jobs seems (at least from external appearances) to have far more thorough top-down control over the company's engineering efforts than Steve Ballmer does; the highest I ever see engineering efforts come down from is our division director.
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Can you mention specific issues with Unix permission management that Windows solves?
One example: given a file, you can create several different access levels. One group can be read-only, one group can have read and write but NOT delete, one group might only be able to modify permissions, and one group might have full access to the file, while "EVERYONE" has no access at all. Administrators, incidentally, need not have access beyond "take ownership" which is an obvious and easily-audited action. Thes…
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One example: given a file, you can create several different access levels. One group can be read-only, one group can have read and write but NOT delete, one group might only be able to modify permissions, and one group might have full access to the file, while "EVERYONE" has no access at all. Administrators, incidentally, need not have access beyond "take ownership" which is an obvious and easily-audited action. Thes…
The old standard file permission system is the default on most unixy systems because it's easy to use and understand (more or less). That doesn't mean these systems don't have ACLs. http://linux.die.net/man/5/acl
In Windows, it's there by default. I'm not claiming that windows is better or more secure, I am simply answering the question that was posed.
>Personally for me, malware is a minor threat with the impact being negligible as long as you follow basic security practices and can recognize when something looks out of place. Likewise, with proper security knowledge, the holes that Apple leaves unpatched for months are "minor threats." For example, disabling Java in the web browser when there's a known vulnerability. It's an inconvenience, but so is having to alw…
"the impact [is] negligible as long as you follow basic security practices and can recognize when something looks out of place" is a worthless statement, because the majority of users have repeatedly proven to be unable to do that (hence MacDefender, hence the largest families of malware on Windows being fake AV.)
it also makes it too easy to hand-wave away security threats. you got a trojan on your MacBook? you obviously weren't following basic security practices.
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Ballmer certainly looks like a great boss, having great care for good engineering practices such as yelling, throwing chairs at people and being generally obnoxious. Also, user experience is a part of good engineering.
Steve Jobs certainly looks like a great boss, calling the entire MobileMe team into an all-hands and asking them point blank why the fuck their software doesn't work. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Steve-Jobs-Not-Shy-of-Using-t... we can both play this game all day. user experience is indeed a part of good engineering, but it's not the be-all and end-all, and eventually you will /always/ run into a place where you mu…
UAC is, in principle, not at odds with equating good user experience with good engineering. It’s all about tradeoffs.
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As an engineer (though admittedly one at Microsoft), Steve Jobs seems like he'd be a /horrible/ boss. All appearances suggest that he doesn't care about good engineering, but rather that he cares about good user experience, damn the torpedoes.
This statement reveals so much about what's wrong with Microsoft... Good engineering is good user experience.
> The Unix Design is significantly less granular than that of Windows, not even having a basic ACL. The UNIX design came from a time when security was less of an issue and not taken as seriously as it did, and so does the job adequately. Windows NT (and later OSes) were actually designed with security in mind and this shows. This comparison doesn't even make sense, comparing a decades old UNIX design to a comparative…
That said, I agree with pretty much all of what you said.