On Tue, 20 May 2003 Yoshiki.Ohshima at acm.org wrote:

> > WinCE has little if any real security....  If it had any, it would be
> > more difficult for us to replace the bootloader that comes with WinCE
> > with the one that we use for Linux (we overwrite the boot sector in flash....
>
>   Well, I'm not big fan of WinCE either, but this sounds a bit unfair.
> Once it boots up, it does have the separated supervisor mode and
> indeed that prevents us from changing cache behavior from user
> program.  It is like saying unix is insecure because you can hit
> Ctrl-C during the boot sequence and get the root privilege:-)

Perhaps a better analogy is running lilo in Linux, which is done as root.
To overwrite the boot sector in Unix, presumably you have to be root.

That said, Unix as we know it certainly isn't the most secure OS in the
world. Given the option, I'd take WinCE for its functionality over PDA
Linux just so I can have Unix's simple user/group security system.   Heck,
Sharp's Zaurus models boot straight into root, which is what WinCE is
doing more or less.

I don't mean to be cheerleading for WinCE- I'm no fan of MS, and other
than my two WinCE-based PDAs, don't use anything they make. But there's a
point where I just use what works...

Regards,
Aaron

  Aaron Reichow  ::  UMD ACM Pres  ::  http://www.d.umn.edu/~reic0024/
  "the end of the human race will be that it will eventually
      die of civilization. "                          :: r. w. emerson