> >>But you haven't answered the fundamental question. >>Is this so that Mom and Dad and the kids can share a computer? >>Or is this so 100 different people can all telnet into a machine and >>be ABSOLUTLY SURE that no one can stomp anyone else? >> >>Those are 2 *MASSIVELY* different projects with different requirements. > >No, you don't need that level of security for multiple users. >But if they are busy downloading viruses/trojan horses and >love to accidentally mangle your system files, then you'd >be really happy if you had the real security system. > >- Alex Again, though, there is a huge difference between file system security (which BeOS has, but is not usually used), desktop multi-user (multiple home directories) and a hardened kernel. Let's take an example. There are multiple ways, under BeOS to access memory that is not really yours. Look at clone_area. It is trivial to get another application's memory space mapped into your data space. Accelerants are another memory hole. Drivers, in a way, a third. A hardened kernel would not allow these. There is a lot more attention paid to security. One of the *BSD's actually does line by line security audits. It is my *personal* (not an official dictate) that this is way beyond what we want to do with OBOS. OTOH, something more like WinNT's login *is* a direction to head in. One user per machine at a time, but multiple accounts on the machine. Different users can have access to applications. Applications write data to the home directory.