[Sugar-devel] Future of Rainbow + Sugar?

[Wade Brainerd]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Michael Stone <michael at laptop.org> wrote:

> I'm not clear why Sugar needs more protection from rogue activities than a
>> normal desktop environment has from rogue applications.
>>
>
> The justification which interests me the most goes something like: "strong
> protections mean that there is less risk that kids and teachers will break
> things by installing software on their machines; therefore, educational
> innovations will spread faster."


See my comment regarding Backup, a far more useful and achievable solution
to this problem.



>  Reinventing the desktop as a constructivist learning environment is a big
>> enough task for one development team / community to swallow.  Reinventing
>> security is an altogether separate cause.
>>
>
> There is no reinvention taking place here; instead, we are using both
> long-standing OS features (discretionary access control; memory isolation)
> and
> novel OS features (network containerization, cgroup-based memory resource
> limits) in new combinations as they become available. What has changed is
> that
> the Sugar UI and user expectations permit concentrated use of these
> features.


In a nutshell, all this refers to Sandboxing, which seems to be the "new
hotness" in software security these days.  I type this email in Google
Chrome, which is a good example of that.

There's nothing wrong with sandboxing or other new security techniques, I
just argue that their purpose is *orthogonal* to the goals of Sugar.

Apologies for incorrectly assuming that you wanted someone to finish
Rainbow.  As far as I know the current implementation is without major
issues, if some of the more advanced features of Bitfrost are not yet
implemented.

Regards,

-Wade
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