Agent101

Not many people bought houses they couldn't afford in the UK. We haven't had huge numbers of repossessions in the UK (fewer than the 1991 recesssion so far). Our banks were more exposed to the american housing market (than europes), and banking is a large part of our economy so we get hit worse when it goes down the tubes.

I'll grant you that current (and most proposed capability based) security systems are too complex for the user to manage.

However the question on the table is research. We should be researching security models that don't rely on the user to manage the complexity.

Personally I consider the fact that a random downloaded game run, by default, could delete all your personal data a pretty big security flaw that can be dealt with at the kernel level.

So we have different meanings of security flaw. Probably because you are thinking of the security of a website, where I am more interested in securing the average users PC.

The point of secure operating systems is not to reduce the number of flaws in the kernel. It is to make the authority gained by exploiting any single program minimal. So it should make flaws less horrible.

Research needs to be done into better operating systems, but I don't think it is worth implementing too much of them.

Minix, from what I have read, isn't going to be a sufficient enough advance to get the man on the street to adopt it. For that to be true it would have to significantly easier to manage. While he advocates the principle of least authority, he isn't currently innovating on how that authority gets passed on to the programs. A lack of mechanism generally means it is up to the user to do so, which puts some work load and cognitive effort on the user.

I'm thinking of a variety of ideas, mainly to do with farming out the decision making process to qualified people who donate. E.g. sending out information to a few people and letting them chose whether to fund it or not.

No point getting too far in advance though, unless I can find potential donors.

I am one of those crackpots as well, I just figured it would be better to try and build an institution for funding OS research than tinker on my own and it whither from lack of people to take it forward.

http://agent101.livejournal.com/5601.html <-- A ycombinator in Php. It can be done in 5.3, pretty it isn't.