users, "private" groups, and The Unix Way (was, Re: Is it me or is it sudo?)

[Tim]

Tim:
>> It always struck me that personal files ought to have no group or
>> world permissions set by default.  If you wanted your files to have
>> those extra permission set, then it ought to be done as a deliberate
>> choice.
> 
Joel Rees:
> Maybe "user-id" is mis-named. There are sure a lot of people who tend
> to see "user-id" and expect the one-to-one correspondence. I know the
> conflation caused me some frustration back in college, and I'm not
> sure I got it properly worked out until I put together a few openbsd
> systems.

I don't see any reason why it should be anything else, and that it's
more of a conflagration to try and do it any other way.

Sure, there's /some/ added security in separated accounts for different
activities, and some added privacy (just recently it's become even more
annoying how if you've logged into one service, you suddenly find that
other things you're looking at have you "logged in as a user" rather
than an anonymous browser).  But there's a lot of mess in when you need
to be able to bridge between those different accounts (read and write to
the files you saved in the other account).  And if you make that dead
easy to do, you've negated the point of using different accounts.

And I certainly don't want to log in three times over, how ever you
organise it, to read my email, browse web pages (related, or not, to the
email I'm reading), write in a word processor (which may involve
browsing some webpages, and copying and pasting), simultaneously.


-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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