And they are off. First one to a widely accepted authenticantion system wins.
But seriously, it looks alot like this would be a great tie in with the reciently proposed.net competitor. Especialy they got a primary dataload that contained all 280+ million Americans. From the Sun / Oracle perspective it woudl be perfict, and would define any other system as a second class wana -be-competitor.
Personaly, I don't trust any of them to build a secure system, or even something reasonibly secure.
Remember DES? The NSA rolled out DES because it wanted everyone to use something it could crack.
Read the article and think. They have a linux distribution that they believe to be bullet proof. They are ging to use this to host other operating systems. A hardened linux box can cat as a security arbiter. That is all they are doing, they are building in a firewall in to every box they'll be using.
The effect of the second can be stunning. There admins will now be able to do anything they want to any Win XXX PCs on there network. Monitor it, patch it, replace the OS, lock out the user, sane and reliable network firewalling, anything they want.
They lose easily verifiable air gaps... which can be violated any time a security officer is not looking, and they gain the ability to truly manage there PC enviorment. Emagine IPSec wrappers for every one of your network transactions, even if the underlying (overriding) Win xxx does not support it. That is a huge win even on just sensitive networks.
At one of my sites I setup A set of tools not unlike stow and graft that would build sets of software for anyone to use. The set of tools would automaticly reconfigure users enviroment like encap (can't remeber were that is from). It would however do it in the filesystem so that you could appropreately control the revisions or toolset that a scritpt was coded to use. A.K.A. #!/home/gulfie/u/project_uts/bin/perl -w
It is not a packaging system as such, it is more of a software installation system, but a packaging system on top of this would be almost trivial... I like trivial it is more likly to be gotten correct.
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But seriously, it looks alot like this would be a great tie in with the reciently proposed .net competitor. Especialy they got a primary dataload that contained all 280+ million Americans. From the Sun / Oracle perspective it woudl be perfict, and would define any other system as a second class wana -be-competitor.
Personaly, I don't trust any of them to build a secure system, or even something reasonibly secure.
Remember DES? The NSA rolled out DES because it wanted everyone to use something it could crack.
Read the article and think. They have a linux distribution that they believe to be bullet proof. They are ging to use this to host other operating systems. A hardened linux box can cat as a security arbiter. That is all they are doing, they are building in a firewall in to every box they'll be using.
The effect of the second can be stunning. There admins will now be able to do anything they want to any Win XXX PCs on there network. Monitor it, patch it, replace the OS, lock out the user, sane and reliable network firewalling, anything they want.
They lose easily verifiable air gaps... which can be violated any time a security officer is not looking, and they gain the ability to truly manage there PC enviorment. Emagine IPSec wrappers for every one of your network transactions, even if the underlying (overriding) Win xxx does not support it. That is a huge win even on just sensitive networks.
I have used an NFS capable variation of /s from the UW Madison CS department.
At one of my sites I setup A set of tools not unlike stow and graft that would build sets of software for anyone to use. The set of tools would automaticly reconfigure users enviroment like encap (can't remeber were that is from). It would however do it in the filesystem so that you could appropreately control the revisions or toolset that a scritpt was coded to use. A.K.A. #!/home/gulfie/u/project_uts/bin/perl -w
It is not a packaging system as such, it is more of a software installation system, but a packaging system on top of this would be almost trivial... I like trivial it is more likly to be gotten correct.