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Back in the day, you used to evaluate trust by making smarter decisions about how you went about installing things. You downloaded it to an isolated environmen

Back in the day, you used to evaluate trust by making smarter decisions about how you went about installing things. You downloaded it to an isolated environment and ran it and proved it didn't cause unexpected side effects. It was run behind a firewall that could log internet communication. If it proved to be good, you ran it in your main environment. If it proved to be bad you warned everyone who would listen to you. I feel like the more "social" the web appears to be becoming, the less social it actually is. We had tight little BBS and IRC communities where this stuff was all discussed. Social meant we actually had meaningful conversations... okay, not always meaningful, but it was often about the pursuit of something useful. It's nigh on impossible with the proliferation of the internet to take this approach these days. Things just didn't scale that well. This is why things like DD-WRT and other hacker sites while being more accessible are still very much a niche market. It's funny how much more technical you had to be back then just to get online. It's as if we're driving the automatic version of the internet now. Back then we had cobble all the pieces together and even when you had, it was like driving with a manual gearshift.

Someone 8y ago
”and proved it didn't cause unexpected side effects.” and convinced yourself it didn't cause unexpected side effects. Put a one month timer in your malware, and this would get past many of such attempts to ‘prove’ the software isn’t evil. Add a few countermeasures against clock shifts (e.g. only be active a few minutes each month or only activate when a) enough time and b) enough user interactions have passed from the first run), and you’ll effectively get past most, if not all, of such black-box testing exercises.
- balabaster 8y ago
  > and convinced yourself it didn't cause unexpected side effects. To be fair, with virus proliferation in today's age, we were still more successful with the remedial precautions back then than seems to be the case today.

Someone 8y ago

”and proved it didn't cause unexpected side effects.” and convinced yourself it didn't cause unexpected side effects. Put a one month timer in your malware, and this would get past many of such attempts to ‘prove’ the software isn’t evil. Add a few countermeasures against clock shifts (e.g. only be active a few minutes each month or only activate when a) enough time and b) enough user interactions have passed from the first run), and you’ll effectively get past most, if not all, of such black-box testing exercises.

balabaster 8y ago
> and convinced yourself it didn't cause unexpected side effects. To be fair, with virus proliferation in today's age, we were still more successful with the remedial precautions back then than seems to be the case today.