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Arcan as Operating System Design (2021)
Time to continue to explain what Arcan actually “is” on a higher level. Previous articles have invited the comparison to Xorg ( part1, part2 ). Another possibility would have been Plan9…
More technically, it might be fine for your laptop to “on-lid-open: automatically enable baseband radio, scan for known access points, connect to them, request/apply DHCP configuration” coupled with some other service waking up to “on network: request and apply pending updates” and so on from the comforts of your home. The point of SHMIF is to have that one IPC system (omitting link to the tired xkcd strip, you know the one); not to end them all, or be gloriously flexible with versioned code-gen ready for another edition of ‘programming pearls’ — but to solve for the data transport, hardening, monitoring and sandboxing for only the flows necessary and sufficient for the desktop. Let them consume the hand-crafted and targeted phishing expedition, remote-forward a debugger as a crash collector to a team that extract and reverse exploit chain and payload, replicate-inject into a few honey pots with some prices for the threat actor to enjoy.
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