Sandbox

While the term “sandbox” has been assigned number of meanings with usages spanning military, videogames, railroad, and even rock bands from Canada and England, our interest in the word sandbox is as it pertains to computer security. Metaphorically, a sandbox is a safe place for children to play in, and it is in this context that it translates to computer security; a safe place to run programs and scripts to avoid possible damage to a critical system – particularly one that is difficult to restore. Such scripts and programs are either third-party programs or software under development. A sandbox for security purposes can be a partitioned drive space with tightly controlled resources and a portion of memory to run commands. For electronic musicians, a sandbox can be very useful for operating system (OS) upgrades (see tech tip), particularly when one has software from numerous manufacturers.