Re: [9fans] novel userspace paradigms introduced by plan 9

[dexen deVries <dexen.devries@gmail.com>]

On Sunday 03 July 2011 19:57:16 Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> Actually, what this discussion keep pointing out is the elegance of the
> Plan9 authentication model vs. UNIX's superuser scheme.  It's the lack
> of a superuser that makes the whole namespace paradigm work in the first
> place.


authentication is a system component by the very nature of the problem it
solves, and keeping it off-line in any way (superuser counts as off-line most
of the time) or high-latency (superuser again) is a significant problem.

in UNIX you have a (non-turing complete) program deployed by the superuser
(contents of /etc/{passwd,group}); any protocol (in the broad sense) that
makes use of authentication has to take that into account.

the current www environment also seems to shifts towards authentication based
on OpenID and similar, which i'd liken to factotum in a broad sense.

--
dexen deVries

> (...) I never use more than 800Mb of RAM. I am running Linux,
> a browser and a terminal.
rjbond3rd in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2692529