Learning by doing

I'll give you two design options that would improve OS privacy.  I am thinking of the Android Operating System, but these are design principles, so they would be just as applicable for a Windows 10 Universal Application (App) or an iOS App.  I am aware that this would be a huge undertaking, but it would be awesome! 1.  Handle-based access This is not a new concept, but when you combine a system with pick-list controls and standard display controls, it is possible to allow an application to choose one or more contacts, display them and send a message without knowing the names or phone numbers.  The system would only expose a single handle to represent each contact.  Only isolated components would have the special privileges allowing access to the private details.  This would change the way applications create custom-drawn components, but would prevent even a HACKED system from leaking information as long as the process isolation subsystem was not compro...

Google has donated Hibernate Shards - a Java 5 add-on to Hibernate that allows application driven data partitioning with your custom or their pre-build configurations. One thing that caught my eye was that when they covered partitioned Native ID generation (aka Identity), they mentioned having Database A use a range 0-200000, Database B use range 200001 - 400000, etc. I know that MySQL cluster suggests using something like this: Database A: Starting ID 1, Increment ID by 3 (number of databases) Database B: Starting ID 2, Increment ID by 3 Database C: Starting ID 3, Increment ID by 3 This allows a hands-off approach, and easily lets you divide ID by 3 and use the remainder to map to a "Shard". Of course, if your data changes significantly, you may have to dump and reload to add another database. One way to avoid a dump and reload is to pick an increment that is larger than your actual database count, and just drop an extra database in an the available Starting ID. This ...