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Comment by quilombodigital | Hacker News Reader

This really reminds me of what Plan 9 was aiming for — breaking out of the 'box' by making everything a file, using per-process namespaces, and cleanly exposing system and network resources with proper permissions. It had that same idea: your environment shouldn't be a prison, it should be a flexible, composable space. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs) (https://fqa.9front.org/fqa0.html)

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Cool idea. Seems like it would require an entirely new philosophy vs our present one on security.

Yes, you would eventually be capable of sharing GPU power, devices, audio, anything. Imagine all your machine´s idle power available to others. Right now your GPU is barely being used.

Yes, but it also removes a lot of footguns. Access to resources (ie. paths mostly) is controlled almost entirely by the parent process, which makes access controls highly pluggable and flexible.

The real problem is Plan9 never really had a lot of attention put on the things that make having a sane security policy good. Factotum seems, at best, to be bolted on after the fact.

> Factotum seems, at best, to be bolted on after the fact.

What gives you this impression?

It literally was, it didn't exist until the 4th edition of Plan9. That isn't to say it isn't a good idea (or implementation), but security is very clearly not a primary concern in Plan9.

> but security is very clearly not a primary concern in Plan9.

That is a myth that keeps getting propagated. https://plan9.io/sys/doc/auth.html

That paper is about factotum which was introduced in 4th edition, like I said. Regardless, I'm more talking about the fact that transport encryption still isn't used ubiquitously to my knowledge.

> That paper is about factotum which was introduced in 4th edition, like I said.

Which describes that yes, there was security in Plan 9 prior to Factotum, just that it wasn't good enough.

> Regardless, I'm more talking about the fact that transport encryption still isn't used ubiquitously to my knowledge.

It certainly is. You get SSL/TLS for free on Plan 9 as its a service. You dont mess with security code and instead use tlssrv(8). See https://man.9front.org/8/tlssrv

I didn't see there wasn't, I said it wasn't a priority.

I stand corrected on tlssrv

I think OpenDoc was meant to be this kind of thing as well. I mean the breaking out of the box part, you can read what other programs write kinda thing.

What an awesome username!

plan9 sucks and people who think it's cool just admit their own bad taste. Unix haters handbook made the case against Plan9 even before anyone thought of the stupid idea.

Nice take. You sound like the kind of person who only ever reads other peoples opinions and then parrots them creating the illusion that you have knowledge. Meanwhile you never bothered to boot the OS or see why people like it. It's actually pretty fucking amazing but that's okay, you are obviously too smart to use it since you read Unix Haters. Have fun with creaky old Unix.

It's definitely unpleasant when opinions you hear seem like they might be parroted, but at least it's in good faith. I find it frustrating to hear argumentation that shames, rather than attempt to correct or add anything.

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