"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Friday, May 14, 2004

Innovation in Privacy and Security

Marc Stiegler illustrates innovation in privacy and security is also associated with dynamic languages. (In Marc's case, E, a secure Lisp/Smalltalk-like language that runs in the JVM.)

you could have one [component] endowed with the power to go to your financial institution domains, and one with the power to go everywhere else (this is not implemented in DarpaBrowser, but it is a straightforward extension). A malicious browser would have trouble stealing your bank password, since the [component] that has the data can't talk to the browser developer's home site
I wonder is someone at Microsoft following these innovations (which are really decades old, yet still innovative and longing to be "mainstreamed"). While Longhorn, in 2007 or so, will bring objects instantiated in XML, databases embedded in the filesystem, and movies playing transparently over your list boxes, would they have the foresight to adopt real innovations into their Palladium designs?

Once again, this innovation in privacy and security, so directly beneficial to the "average consumer", arises naturally from the dynamic, "first-class" objects and functions found in Lisp and Smalltalk even 30-40 years ago. Rigid language syntax checking or type theories will make your systems neither more expressive nor more secure than these simple innovations.

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.