Why Unix? It's not like it's the ultimate OS. If M$ is smart, they'll forge ahead with Singularity. Unix's security model is great for mainframes with a knowledgeable super user custodian. It's outdated for today's Internet.
Unix's security model is great for mainframes with a knowledgeable super user custodian. It's outdated for today's Internet.
You're right that the traditional user-group-other read-write-execute security model is outdated, but modern freenixes have support for ACLs -- so in this respect Microsoft could replicate the existing Windows model on top of Unix.
I don't think that Microsoft should give up on Singularity -- it sounds like a very exciting research project -- but it might be a good idea to have a back-up plan in case Singularity doesn't work out.
It probably means that the Unix security model (user,group,world) is a bit limited and has a single point of failure(root). Anything less than capabilities is going to have similar flaws.
