Saying 'No' to an Executable Internet

Dylan Knight Rogers writes "Applications are constantly being ported for usage on the Internet - either for a viable escape from expensive software, or because it's often helpful to have an app that you can access from anywhere. Operating systems that run from the Web will be a different story."

Comments

Ah, yes

[Anonymous Coward]

That would require a

chmod a-x internet

Re:Ah, yes

[Idolatre]

mount /dev/eth0 -t internetfs -o noexec

would be safer

Re:Ah, yes

[Anonymous Coward]

kill -9 internet

errrr....

[scenestar]

Wasn't UNIX designed to run off a main frame with network terminals connected to it?

Re:errrr....

[Zeinfeld]

UNIX was first implemented seriously on the PDP-11/20, which is best classed as a minicomputer. And while the system did indeed use terminals of a sort, they were dumb terminals. It's really not any different than how the keyboard, mouse and monitor are connected to your PC now.

It would have been quite a trick to design an operating system based on the principles of the network protocols later developed on it.

That said, the dumb terminal to mainframe concept was a big part of the UNIX legacy. UNIX was designed from the start as a multi-user environment for the individual user. The kernel supported multiple users but the tasks it was designed for were single user tasks, mostly programming. UNIX was a reaction against mainframe computing of its day.

The author is completely wrong when he says that Windows did not have any security until 2000. Windows NT was designed from the outset to obtain Orange book B2 certification. It would take a huge amount of work to get Linux to meet that criteria. It is generally considered to be 'B2 equivalent' but thats like saying that being ABD is the same thing as having a Phd, the only people who say that are ABD grad students.

Likewise the author is completely wrong about Microsoft being likely to take the O/S in that direction. Unix and VMS led the minicomputer revolution. Gates led the microcomputer revolution which was even more against the central processing store model of computing. If you look at all the early microcomputers you will find that they all ran Microsoft Basic. When IBM went to Microsoft while it was building the PC it was the BASIC they wanted. They only demanded a bootstrap loader when Kildal refused to deal with them for CPM.

The company that tried to make the network the operating system was Netscape. They failed for several reasons, the most important of which was you can't hire 5000 world class engineers in a year and even if you could that you would not end up with a world class team. MarcA's policy of never hiring anyone he thought might be smarter than him didn't help either.

The company that seems to be making the attempt now is Google. They might make it, at this point it is unclear.

Re:errrr....

[pthisis]

Windows NT was designed from the obtain to have Orange book B2 certification

This is true, but:

1. Windows NT was only certified B2 secure when not connected to a network.

2. Orange book isn't related to the type of security we're talking about; the certification says nothing about whether there are bugs in the system allowing remote attacks or even local privilege escalations. It only talks about how the system is nominally designed, and even there it's more about logging who does what on the system and forbidding things like copying and pasting between applications running at different security levels.

Forget it

[BadDoggie]

We gave up on the idea of centralised systems a long time ago with good reason. I remember coding COBOL on 3270s which had to connect to some computer center elsewhere. Can't connect? Can't work.

Local apps give us a lot of freedom. It might be nice to be able to also have such a centralised system available, but even with access on planes, there are always times and places you'll be cut off.

woof.

Anyone RTFA?

[MyLongNickName]

Sheesh. This was more a "Microsoft Suck0rs, Linux RULZ" article. Very little in the way of actual content and analysis. How did something like this make it on Slashdot? Ooops never mind

Yawn, we've been doing this for 15+ years

[DrSkwid]

plan9 boots across the internet since forever, the networked file system is delightful, none of this NFS idiocy.

I was horrified when I went back to set up networking booting in Un*xville, yes, horrified. "These people are dumb, not the terminals" is about the most polite I could be about the state of "the network IS the computer".

Huh?

[Otter]

This reads like the author took twelve completely unrelated +3 comments from Slashdot articles and stuck them together.

Basically, his point is that Lunix rulz and Microsoft is teh sux and such will continue to be the case with AJAX apps. That doesn't make sense even if you concede all the author's idiotic premises.

This article is one big troll.

[Vellmont]

Strangely I thought I was going to read an article about operating systems that run from the web (whatever that means). So I happily click on the article and start reading, wondering what an internet executable operating system is. Ok, history of windows, vast over-simplifications.. read read read.. but yet still no content. Turns out, there really is no content.

Taco, you should be embarrassed for posting the article. There's nothing here but a bad rant about how Windows is a terrible OS, and microsoft sucks. You may agree or disagree with that statement, but rants against Windows aren't news.

The Point?

[generic-man]

I read through that article and it just sounds like one pretentious blogger's disdain for Microsoft. Let's run through all the things that got this fast-tracked to Slashdot:

• Early mention of Steve Ballmer throwing a chair as a microcosm of Microsoft's supposed corporate culture
• Rampant grammer* and spelling errors overshadowed by a blind sense of faith in the Linux community. Example: "The Linux community will publish every vulnerability, regardless of it's criticality, but the chances that a hacker will even choose to expliot those vulnerabilities is very low, (unnecessary comma) since most of them are of low criticality and it would be stupid to do so, anyways." So people don't attack Linux because "it would be stupid to do so." Thank you.
• The actual "Executable Internet" isn't mentioned until the second-to-last paragraph: "The only reason a version of Windows that runs from the Internet would even exist would be because there is competition. Microsoft simply does not have enough fists to punch every opponent; resulting in a poorly designed operating platform and ignorant users who don't know the difference between WEP and WPA and those who are also accustomed to having Viagara advertisements greet them every time they boot their computers." Seems like this man is more upset that the hoi polloi use Linux than that Microsoft doesn't care about security.

This is pure Linux-user elitism, the sort of smug "Our Opponent Just Doesn't Get It; We Do; and We're Smarter Than You" attitude that loses political battles and makes the arguer only look like a pretentious fool in the eyes of the skeptic.

I dislike Microsoft as much as the next Slashdot user but this article is awful: it simply slams Microsoft as the Big Corporate Machine with quotes like "Microsoft does not publish all their security vulnerabilities because other executive stockholders, whom are also ignorant would become worried and eventually begin to question the platform's security." If I wanted to hear ramblings about the willfully ignorant I'd listen to a David Cross album.

* Intentional typo used to point out how correcting grammar on Slashdot usually leads to a spelling error, or vice versa

Re:The Point?

[BuR4N]

"The spelling errors are due in part that I type at 89 wpm."

You should put that in your CV.

Re:The Point?

[Tim Browse]

I think this is the kind of attitude that people are annoyed by. Receiving criticism with "Yeah, I make mistakes, but that's because I'm so 1337z0rs that I type at 89wpm!" is not really going to cut it. Because if nothing else, if that's the case, then, hey, guess what, you can't type at 89wpm! To paraphrase Gerald Weinberg, I can type at 120wpm if I don't have to get the words right.

And they're not English instructors - some posters can just speak English and find mistakes glaring and detract from the message (see Marshall McLuhan). But go ahead with your arrogant responses. It just makes it easier for the rest of us to filter you out.

People will mostly accept honest mistakes. When the offender instead tries to make out that their mistakes aren't mistakes at all, for whatever reason, when clearly they are, this is what tries people's patience.

article summary

[homer_s]

Windows sucks
Linux rulez
and , oh.. .executable internet...something...something...

May I suggest instead ...

[icepick72]

Just say 'No' to This Article

Thanks.

Worst Article EVER

[pyite]

This is the worst article ever linked to on Slashdot. I'd tell you read it and see for yourself, but I really don't want to put anyone else through that experience. Can I have my five minutes back?

This article misses the point.

[nesabishii]

First let me point out a few odd statements in this article:

"factors that Microsoft paid little to no attention to and still don't today would be gaming consoles..."

The X-Box and the X-Box 360? Microsoft put billions of dollars into those gaming consoles.

"As experience tells us, 'easily used' operating systems such as Windows are notorious for poor security..."

What about Apple's Unix-based OS X? That's often considered easier to use than Windows for new computer users.

"resulting in a poorly designed operating platform and ignorant users who don't know the difference between WEP and WPA..."

It seems like he's arguing that the users of an operating system determine the quality of that operating system.

Really, I think this article misses the point. Internet-based OSes will not be feasible now or in the near future, I agree; however, that has more to do with bandwidth limitations, and the enormous variety of hardware out there, than security flaws in Windows (Live?). Security will always be a big issue--especially when distributed to a network of hundreds of millions of computers--but the hardware and infrastructure issues will derail the process much earlier and more severely, IMO.

Re:404 - Page not found

[Gobelet]

Say thanks to Mirrordot: http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/7557de839a5ddfdc3 c7cc58ef2009982/index.html

Re:Wow! A post to your own blog!

[tomhudson]

http://dylanknightrogersblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/ will-executable-internet-ruin-security.html Not Found

The requested URL was not found on this server. Please visit the Blogger homepage or the Blogger Knowledge Base for further assistance.

So much for saying "No" to the Eecutable Internet. "They" must have gotten him.

IT Phone Home!

[Paraplex]

Well we all know that only assholes have opinions (which leaves only assholes to make decisions.. great) but I thought I'd throw in my two cents

Gmail updates whether I like it or not. I'm always using the latest version, so now i'm stuck with a fking IM client for a mail host.

Hamachi doesn't run online, but phones home constantly and nags you relentlessly to "update to version X.X" every time they release a minor bug fix. When you give in and click "update" the thing is riddled with new bugs the previous version didn't have.

iTunes is similar. I never wanted all the bloat the latest versions give me. Thank christ its not an online prog. I can run the version I choose.

I spent $99 on HalfLife 2 and *cannot* play it anymore because of the very poor "Phone Home" code in steam that refuses to contact the server.

I got locked out of *my own* computer once for a day after an XP update. That wasn't cheap
I'm desparately trying to swap to linux to avoid the Vista DRM hell.

I love accessing my software from this computer remotely (using hamachi at present, but this seems to be an under developed tech) & would love to use a web interface to access info & software from my home PC from any device at any time, but I would like to retain the power over what runs on *my* pc & where that info is stored.

InternetOS

[JWSmythe]

    Ummmm...

    Can't you run thin clients (of some variety) over the Internet? Like the variety that consist of a boot disk (floppy, CD, or boot ROM) and pull the rest from elsewhere?

Re:You need to do better than that

[Ex-MislTech]

Likewise subsistance farming (there's not enough land for each person to farm enough for himself).

The rest of your point was good, this part is horribly wrong .

The majority of US farm land has been idled due to the low cost of foreign food,
and the influx of huge Corporate farms like ADM(Archer Daniels Midland).

During Depression/World War II the people were told to grow a garden in there back yards
to deal with the situation .

My Grandparents still had this habit when I was growing up as a kid thru the 70's and 80's .

We had so much food we canned it, froze it, and gave it away .

The large cities of the east and left coast this is not practical, but there are large
patches of land throughout the mid west that were crushed due to Globalization and
Willy Nelson and Friends held a series of concerts called Farm Aid for all the farmers
whose families and lives were ruined by the globalization of food .

http://www.farmaid.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ab outus_history

While it is good and great that we help the poor outside our borders, it is bad
that we make our nation vulnerable to shipping embargos and eat food from countries
that do not have the same pesticide rules as we do in the US .

Soil and water pollution levels in these countires are not monitored like they are here .

The taxes on land, the equipment, and the fuel are not on equal footing either, so the
US farmer cannot compete and a large number of small farms went broke .

The cost of living is higher here, as is the cost of doing business .

Outourcing our food will be something that will come back to haunt us in the future .

I was born and raised on a farm, and I dare say you were not .

Ex-MislTech

rm -rf /../*

[gomel]

rm -rf /../*

what's above root dir? Does anbybody know?

Re:rm -rf /../*

[Anonymous Coward]

In case your question is serious, the root dir parents itself.

Re:Dumb Idea?

[merreborn]

I proposed the same idea to my father when I was in highschool. The thing is internet latency is very, very high compared to the latency involved in hitting your own processor/memory. This ends up severely limiting the type of applications you can run in this sort of setting.

Botnets are an interesting example of this sort of computing, though. In fact, botnets are the closest thing we have to this sort of idea being implemented right now.

Anyway, the point is that real time applications such as gaming wouldn't really see much benefit from this. By the time someone else could execute part of your processing, and send the result back to you, you character is already a foot from where you were when you requested the work, and the old work is now completely irrelevant. Even more, I can't think of a single use for GPUs that *isn't* realtime -- distributed GPU use over the net is almost certainly 100% impractical. It's not uncommon for gamers to play at and above 100 FPS -- that leaves your system 10 milliseconds to render every frame; you can hardly ping someone a block away in that time -- severely limiting the number of computers available to your 'cluster'. Also latency is NOT garanteed on the net, much less successful, in order delivery.

It works for apps like SETI@home because seti just sends you a chunk of work every few minutes or hours, and doesn't particularly care if and when you finish it. There's no 10 ms deadline on SETI -- the project will finish when it finishes.

Internet wide cluster computing is most suitable for applications that are primarily about converting a very large input (years of SETI data, protein folding data, massive mailing lists for bot nets) into very large output (analyzed data, folded proteins, spam) over a long, unpredictable period of time.

Re:Wow! A post to your own blog!

[general_re]

"They" must have gotten him.

Obviously the internet executed him.

Re:Wow! A post to your own blog!

[shmlco]

The author apparently pulled his own work out of embarassment, and understandably so. The article was a badly written opinion piece flaming Microsoft and praising Linux. Imagine that. Almost no mention of the "Executable Internet" at all.

Reading it's a waste of time, but here's the mirror for those interested.