| >Software security is dire It's 2024, why are we still blaming everything except the Operating Systems? > simple products importing 1600 dependencies of unknown provenance. Put yourself back in 1984... you've got an IBM XT with 2 floppy disks. You made write protected copies of all your important disks, and even more copies of your boot disk. You'd go to a computer show, or your user group, and come home with stacks of software of unknown provenance, and then just try everything out over the next few weeks. You were safe because your system made it easy to know what you were risking when you ran a program. There was one simple rule that was easy to understand: Only un-write protected floppy disks in the drives were at risk. That quite limited computer system was, in effect, a capability based security system. Crude, but extremely effective. Here it is 40 years later, and the ability to just run code with abandon like we used to seems to be a fantasy to younger people. Because we don't expect our operating systems to be at least as safe as MS-DOS on an IBM-XT. |