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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

We’re a constitutional monarchy AND a democracy. The monarch is the disabled root account of the nation. The government is the sudoers

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Sounds like the system would be simpler if we removed root and gave capabilities to the sudoers instead.

Edit: why does the disabled root account allocate so much RAM?

Can you do that without rebooting? Rebooting nations tends to be a messy affair. Just ask France.

"Every operating system then, and every threat model, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be deployed longer, it is legacy tech, and should be deprecated." - Thomas Jefferson

Move fast and break things

- Napoleon Bonaparte

There is a story, often told, that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: "A republic, if you can keep it past 19 years. At that time the sudoers will change the repositories used for OS updates." [1]

"What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the contents of sudoers? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of sysadmins and backdoors. It is it’s natural manure." [2] Thomas Jefferson

[1] https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/h...

[2] https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/tre...

Arguably every election that brings in a new government is a reboot. A revolution is more like wiping the drive and installing a new OS.

A revolution is more like wiping the drive and installing a new OS - from a backup that still contains malware from the previous revolution.

I'd say it's more like an upgrade. The release notes promise all sorts of improvements, but they often bring new bugs.

> Arguably every election that brings in a new government is a reboot. A revolution is more like wiping the drive and installing a new OS.

In the UK, Governments change but Parliament persists. The basics mechanism of state are unchanged until a new Govt defines and votes through new policies. Unlike the US, the UK's civil service doesn't substantially change as a result of an election.

The last really significant change to Parliament was perhaps the 1832 reform act which got of rotten boroughs - constituencies with few if any voters that still returned MPs. Since then the House of Commons has gained primary over the House of Lords, whose main role now is delaying/modifying Govt proposals. The last big reboot was the Restoration.

Or Italy. Especially Italy.

Rebooting is old school. People are like, look we rebooted our Windows in 1777 why are you still using that outdated Constitutional Monarchy stuff? Don't you realise we gave up monarchs hundreds of years ago? Meanwhile we have been live patching and running pacman daily and have installed packages for metric, proportional voting(not everywhere), gun control, universal healthcare and plastic bank notes.

The root account was written when it was fashionable to be object-oriented, so its resource allocation is all due to inheritance.

Scotland in particular is upset because of certain issues due to multiple inheritance.

LOL. Great comment.

But it's not just Scotland. The War of the Roses had some multiple inheritance problems, too.

> The War of the Roses had some multiple inheritance problems, too.

They defined a custom method combinator that squashed the diamond problem. Implementing it was literally painful for many of the people involved. Truly a killer problem.

And then in 16.8.8 they imported a completely new package from the Netherlands called 'Orange' (but they rebranded it), and marked a bunch of things as 'protected' to lock down inheritance.

Even when there is an ISA relationship the subsequent objects are never quite the same as the root object for which the system was designed.

President Boris. Sounds fantastic. Perhaps not though, yeah?

In a lot of countries, it would be much better than "prime minister Boris". Look at the president roles in Italy and Germany, for example. Not all countries in the world are the US.

We already have a non political head of state. I’m not sure I see any benefit in us switch to a system like Italy or Germany.

I am not British, so I have no skin in the game. But the issue in general is not the fact that there is a head of state with a mostly-ceremonial role, it’s all the baggage that comes with the monarchy (detailed by others in this thread).

I find the general feeling here is that the system isn't perfect, but none are really and what we have has worked for a long time and there isn't much desire to change it.

We'd just be switching for the baggage of an elected head of state and I'm not sure there is any stomach here for another issue that divides so deeply after going through the Brexit campaign/process.

Nope nope nope nope. Requiring privileged access is a code smell. Capability based government now!

Been there, done that already. The British have tried that before.

We called it the Interregnum[1]. It turned out nobody liked a system without a superuser so the fix was a restoration plus tweaks to limit powers.

You’ll note this all happening well before others decided to repeat the experiment.

The system has been ticking along at some definition of “fine”[2] ever since.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Interregnum

2. Personally I’m less concerned about who the ceremonial head of state is than I am about having a police force that refuses to investigate the Prime Minister for breaking the law[3].

Whilst at the same time retrospectively investigating women for breaking the very same law by attending a protest about the murder of a woman by a serving officer of that very same police force.

Now that is fucked up.

3. See private ABBA party.

> It turned out nobody liked a system without a superuser

I thinks it’s more the case that the commons at the time couldn’t get their shit together.

>It turned out nobody liked a system without a superuser //

Somehow the guy who managed to take over was an even bigger shit of a person than most of the past monarchs and so the people agreed to have a monarch again under a 'better the devil you know [and can limit with magna carta]' sort of deal.

It's like how we got screwed out of PR by being offered AV.

The monarchy would love for you to believe they're only a ceremonial head of state. It makes their sinister and self-serving wielding of power much easier. In fact the Queen routinely gets laws changed in her favor, and the details of the process by which this happens are not widely known. The monarchy is a vast and private rent-seeking apparatus that exists to perpetuate the interests of its family members and their business holdings, and is inexplicably afforded vast political power and reverence. It is a rotten leftover that has no place in the 21st century.

As for "some definition of fine", I think it is increasingly clear that the UK is not fine and has in fact never been fine, or even much of a democracy, and has been essentially run by a corrupt aristocracy for centuries. It's not a secret that the whole lot of them all went to Eton - that should raise eyebrows among anyone not inured to the whole sordid business.

(Well, I should say that it's only really England with this issue. But England is the imperial core of the UK. Its satellite states are more sane, but thoroughly subjugated.)

As an American, we don’t have anything like you corrupt aristocracy and class system. But we do have a corrupt billionaire class and systemic racism, so actually it’s the same thing after all. Instead of Eton, Harvard and Yale are the schools of the upper crust; it’s virtually impossible to be on the Supreme Court unless you attended one of those universities.

And instead of a queen, we have Kardashians and Elon (blessings and peace be upon him), who also seem to attract worship for things other people do. It’s almost like human nature tends to reproduce the same problems no matter the system of government.

>In fact routinely gets laws changed in her favor.

"Routinely" is a pretty substantial claim - certainly there have been occasions where the crown has been involved in negotiations over their own tax affairs.

Other than that, what 'routine' changes in legislation would you point to?

Well, that's the thing. No one can really say, because - get this - it's a secret.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/queen-lobbie...

> significant amounts of legislation regulating otherwise quite ordinary activities have required consent. The Queen pays tax, so (for example) finance laws require consent. The Queen is an employer, so (for example) child support and pensions laws require consent. And so on... All correspondence containing requests for consent, replies and the documentation of any related discussions have always been shrouded in absolute privacy.

But hey, I'm sure it's fine, no need to look any closer, right? The Queen is such a nice old lady, surely -

> The documents uncovered by the Guardian provide remarkable evidence that this process accords the Queen’s advisers a genuine opportunity to negotiate with the government over changes in proposed laws, that they do sometimes secure such changes before giving consent, and that they are even prepared to threaten to withhold consent to secure their policy preferences.

Ah. Oh dear.

If I were a Brit, I'd be more concerned that the Parliament can do literally anything with a simple majority vote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty_in_t...

Because investing both sovereignty and power in a single institution inexorably leads to tyranny. Examples abound.

> Sounds like the system would be simpler if we removed root and gave capabilities to the sudoers instead.

A good portion of the top ten democracies are 'disabled root' (constitutional monarchy):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#By_country

As a Canadian I'm not so much "against" switching away for constitutional monarchy, but rather any proposal needs to ensure we stay high in rankings. See also (2021> Pts: higher is better):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World#Country_r...

(I have no comment/idea on 'useful' these metric actually are.)

As an Australian we solved this by having root's resources swapped out and hosted on storage paid for and hosted in the UK.

We have another privileged account called gg which inherits all of root's privileges. Given that the root account may be transferred in the not too distant future there is increasing interest in making gg the new root. As to why we need such a privileged account in the first place to host garden parties and cut ribbons, gg provides a supervisor process that can kill deadlocked governments and respawn them.

It seems a bit silly but at least our government isn't based on VMS.

The queen was exercising secret veto power, I don't think root was disabled.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfr...

I think this is the link you meant, because when I click yours I just get a favicon:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vette...

>The documents also show that on other occasions the monarch’s advisers demanded exclusions from proposed laws relating to road safety and land policy that appeared to affect her estates, and pressed for government policy on historic sites to be altered.

I like to read this as the Queen demanding that such common things like "speed limits" and "drive on the correct side of the road" shall not apply to Her Majesty.

When you disable an account, processes running under that account are still live, and can still spawn children.

I hope you're not suggesting we kill the processes.

SIGSTOP is reversible and unblockable.

You can just deny them the resource quota.

That is one of the more brilliant (and accurate) analogies I have ever seen!

Love this analogy. As a Canadian...we have the same monarch, but our own Constitution / elected officials. So...we are ourselves in the sudoers file...but surely we are different under this analogy than our UK brethren? What are we a VM with sudo root?

I'd see the governors has some kind kerberos authorized set of admin accounts. And we are the lowly users and sudoers.

Something like that. And with the Governor General as the VM root.

Technically we have a different monarch that is occupied by the same person (she is “the queen of the uk and the queen of Canada”, not really “queen of the uk and Canada”) and has the same rules of succession (implemented in a Canadian bill that must be updated in sync with the British equivalent when it changes).

So it’s maybe more like a Kerberos auth server with local configuration.

I suggest that in the next bill, rather than updating the Crown to rest in Charles's CNAME, you acknowledge that the Crown is perpetually Elizabeth II.

That way you never have to change Birthday celebrations, or anything else related.

We already solved the birthday celebration problem. The Queen's official birthday in Canada is May 24th. Charles' official birthday in Canada will be May 24th. We just decided at some point the best monarch's birthday to celebrate is Queen Victoria and have stuck with it.

The Dutch continued celebrating Queen Juliana's birthday (April 30th) as their national day when Queen Beatrix succeeded her, as they didn't want to move an event which is traditionally celebrated outdoors to January.

Beatrix was succeeded by King Willem-Alexander, who was born on April 27th- so the national day moved to his actual birthday. April 30th is now known mainly for confused tourists expecting a party that happened three days earlier.

Ah! Good ol' DNS. Nothing can go wrong now!

We don't really update it for each new monarch, it's just a set of rules. They were last changed fairly recently, to remove male primogeniture in case Prince William had a daughter as his first child (though he didn't). Every single Commonwealth country had to pass its own individual bill amending the Act of Succession, and it finished in 2015[1]. It's pretty unlikely they'll change again any time soon, the only thing that's still up for much debate is the requirement that the person sitting on the throne isn't Catholic.

It'd be a hell of a scandal if these laws got out of sync, and yet it would be one of the stupidest scandals in history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Agreement

The AU/CA/NZ servers were based on the UK server image and the GECOS field of root still says "Queen Victoria, heirs or successors" but is otherwise disabled. The servers are all run by separate orgs in independent data centres and have diverged substantially from the original image. Possibly root may still have physical access to the UK server but the threat is considered minimal.

It's probably more like the monarch is the disabled root account, and the prime minister has an unassuming username but with ID 0.

The UK has an hereditary monarch with all the pomp and no power as cover for an elected monarch with no pomp and all the power.

I don't know if this is more appropriate, but I've always thought of the monarch as PID 1, and parliament as a child process running under the root account.

>The monarch is the disabled root account of the nation. The government is the sudoers

except, even with "disabled root account", you can do "sudo su" to get a root shell. What's the equivalent of that in uk?

The supreme court?

Pretty much exactly that. The Government can (and does) request a Privy Council meeting, which issues various kinds of Orders in the name of the Queen. The Queen's Speech is another (less instrumental) way of government using the root account directly.

(Or, I suppose, you could `$ sudo su`and then `# instantiate_republic` to permanently promote the usual administrator account to root. Still not clear it's wise to directly govern from account 0, though).

I'm not sure the Queen-in-Council is any more (or less) the person of the monarch distinct from the institutional government than, say, the Queen-in-Parliament is. Everything is done in the name of the Queen, one way or another, and almost all of it is practically at the direction of the government.

Yeah, maybe that stretches the analogy too far. I think it is distinct from ministers governing in their own right (or in the right of the semi-fictional unitary 'Secretary of State') though. Most statutory instruments, for example, are issued by and in the name of a minister. Obviously the appointment of the minister is an act of the Crown, and so is the passing of the original Act which authorises the order-making power. But the power is used directly from their own ministerial user account, IYSWIM.

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