String uids for power and security

[Guy Harris]

>The cheap solution is to just make UIDs 32 bits.  This is what was
>done in AIX 3.1 (over the protestations of our dear friends at AT&T,
>The Protectors Of The Holy Squid), and is now I understand being
>done with V.4.

It is, at least for all systems conforming to any of the ABIs defined
for S5R4; UIDs, GIDs, process ID's, inumbers, "dev_t"s, "int"s (yes,
"int"s, no ABI-conforming system can have "int"s shorter than 32 bits),
link counts, and file modes ("st_mode" in the "stat" structure) must be
32 bits or longer in any ABI-conforming system.

>In a really sick universe you would be known by your 32 bit user ID
>and your 32 bit host IP address.

Said universe gets even sicker if, as, and when it converts to ISO....