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Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 15:06 UTC (Fri) by johnkarp (subscriber, #39285)
In reply to: Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek) by drag
Parent article: Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

No internal boundries or anything like that.
The Windows registry doesn't have fine-grained permissions, but it is composed of several discrete 'hives'. Each user only has access to their own hive, plus system hives that they may or may not have write-access to depending on their priviledges.


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Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 16:42 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Well ya I know about the 'hives' and such. Been that way since W2k. And you still can't just go in and edit them with any sort of reliability.

It's still a mess and it's not all Microsoft's fault. When you configure a application were do the changes get saved? Why do lots of Window's program's require administrative rights? The answer, is of course, it depends on the application and what the application developer felt like doing at the time.

This is something they worked on fixing for Vista, but they can't really fix it in a strong way or they break that all important backward compatibility.

Of course this is the sort of bullshit people will start seeing in Linux, with applications being set setuid for the sole reason so they can save configuration stuff to some bizzare location like /usr/var/etc/config once those same proprietary application developers (aka ISVs) start making their applications available on Linux... But I am hoping that people are smart enough and have enough backbone to reject that sort of behavior.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 13, 2007 4:56 UTC (Mon) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

My memory of the registry on NT derived versions of Windows was that each registry key could have an ACL attached to it, the same as for files.

Of course, the ACLs on registry keys only apply for access via the registry APIs. When accessing the hive on disk, it is only as secure as the file permissions.

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