logins? access to private data on the phone

[Joe Pfeiffer]

After spending a few minutes today being annoyed again by my Palm
Pilot's idea of security, I'm wondering how logins and security will
be handled by openmoko (and how they're handled by existing Linux
PDAs).

What I'd like to see would be for most functions to be available
without the need for any sort of login.  I don't want to have to enter
a password to answer my phone or listen to an MP3!  However, when I
access data I've marked as private, I should have to enter a password;
having looked at some private data, I'd like to be able to keep
looking at private data for some time -- sort of like how sudo on my
desktop doesn't ask for my password for every command I execute, but
if I don't execute a sudo command for a while, it decides to ask for a
password again.

What I *don't* want is what Palm does:  they've got the first part of
wishes right -- unless I lock the device, I can do things like dial
the phone without a password.  Where they screw up is with their
handling of private records:  I can mark a record as private, and then
I can set security on the phone to either view or hide private
records.  If I ask to view private records I enter a password -- at
which point I can see all private records on the phone, from then
until I manual hide them all again.  The result is that I
all-too-often discuver I've been walking around for days with various
private databases exposed to the world....