Copilot https://github.com/microsoft/litebox/blob/main/.github/copil...
To be expected, given how many organisations now require employees to use AI if they want to meet their OKRs, especially all that sell AI tools.
Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
61–70 of 239 posts
Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#62With how buggy their flagship OS has become, why would I trust anything else they release to be better? Or even if it does work well now, why should I expect it to stay that way? Microsoft has burned through all possible goodwill at this point, at least for me.
Microsoft doesn't have a very good track record with security or privacy. Maybe it works, but yeah you'll probably get screwed over at some point.
Still, the fact that it's open source is a good thing. People can now take that code and make something better (ripping out the AI for example) or just use bits and pieces for their own totally unrelated projects. I can't see that as anything but a win. I have no problem giving shitty companies credit where its due and they've done a good thing here.
Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#63What is a 'library OS'?
It's a library that is linked to in place of an operating system - so whatever interface the OS provided (syscalls+ioctls, SMC methods, etc.) ends up linked / compiled into the application directly, and the "external interface" of the application becomes something different. This is how most unikernels work; the "OS" is linked directly into the application's address space and the "external interface" becomes either h…
> So for example with this project, you could take a Linux application's codebase, recompile it linked to LiteBox
If you have to recompile, you might as well choose to recompile to WASM+WASI. The sandboxing story here is excellent due to its web origins. I thought the point of LiteBox is that recompilation isn’t needed.
Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#64The lack of integrated sandboxing in windows compared to android/iphone is still frankly unacceptable. I've become increasingly paranoid about running any application on Windows (not that your average linux distro is even remotely better) and yet Apple and Google seem to be far, far ahead in user permissions (especially with GrapheneOS, god bless that team) and isolation of processes. Consumers and businesses deserve…
UWP, and MSIX on Win32 via Appstore.
There is also sandboxing configuration via Intune for enterprises.
Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#65With how buggy their flagship OS has become, why would I trust anything else they release to be better? Or even if it does work well now, why should I expect it to stay that way? Microsoft has burned through all possible goodwill at this point, at least for me.
UI of Windows is buggy and inconsistent. Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.
NTFS, not so great.
Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a library that is linked to in place of an operating system - so whatever interface the OS provided (syscalls+ioctls, SMC methods, etc.) ends up linked / compiled into the application directly, and the "external interface" of the application becomes something different. This is how most unikernels work; the "OS" is linked directly into the application's address space and the "external interface" becomes either h…
> So for example with this project, you could take a Linux application's codebase, recompile it linked to LiteBox If you have to recompile, you might as well choose to recompile to WASM+WASI. The sandboxing story here is excellent due to its web origins. I thought the point of LiteBox is that recompilation isn’t needed.
Looking more closely, it looks like there are some "North" sides (platforms) with ABI shims (currently Linux and OP-TEE), but others (Windows, for example), would still require recompilation.
> If you have to recompile, you might as well choose to recompile to WASM+WASI.
I disagree here; this ignores the entire swath of functionality that an OS or runtime provides? Like, as just as an example, I can't "just recompile" my OP-TEE TA into WASM when it uses the KDF function from the OP-TEE runtime?
Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
UI of Windows is buggy and inconsistent. Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.
>Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good. This. A while ago a build of Win 11 was shared/leaked that was tailored for the Chinese government called "Windows G" and it had all the ads, games, telemetry, anti-malware and other bullshit removed and it flew on 4GB RAM. So Microsoft CAN DO IT, if they actually want to, they just don't want to for users. You can get something similar yourself at home r…
Talked about back in the Vista days publicly (I cannot find the articles now) - Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing.
So they are not incentivized to keep Win32_Lean_N_Mean, but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11.
I have no insider knowledge here, just this is a thing which get talked about around major Windows releases historically.
Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#68[flagged]
Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#69The lack of integrated sandboxing in windows compared to android/iphone is still frankly unacceptable. I've become increasingly paranoid about running any application on Windows (not that your average linux distro is even remotely better) and yet Apple and Google seem to be far, far ahead in user permissions (especially with GrapheneOS, god bless that team) and isolation of processes. Consumers and businesses deserve…
There are containers, and one of their users is the Windows Sandbox - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/applicati...
Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#70With how buggy their flagship OS has become, why would I trust anything else they release to be better? Or even if it does work well now, why should I expect it to stay that way? Microsoft has burned through all possible goodwill at this point, at least for me.
UI of Windows is buggy and inconsistent. Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.
> Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.
In their intended applications, which might or might not be the ones you need.
The slowness of the filesystem that necessitated a whole custom caching layer in Git for Windows, or the slowness of process creation that necessitated adding “picoprocesses” to the kernel so that WSL1 would perform acceptably and still wasn’t enough for it to survive, those are entirely due to the kernel’s archtecture.
It’s not necessarily a huge deal that NT makes a bad substrate for Unix, even if POSIX support has been in the product requirements since before Win32 was conceived. I agree with the MSR paper[1] on fork(), for instance. But for a Unix-head, the “good” in your statement comes with important caveats. The filesystem is in particular so slow that Windows users will unironically claim that Ripgrep is slow and build their own NTFS parsers to sell as the fix[2].
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/785430/
[2] https://nitter.net/CharlieMQV/status/1972647630653227054