3 ms·

> If some people’s only experience of a device is of a rooted device, then they’ll have no idea what an actually tampered device looks like, because every devic

by deogeo 8y ago

> If some people’s only experience of a device is of a rooted device, then they’ll have no idea what an actually tampered device looks like, because every device they’ve seen is “tampered.” This is false. All but the most technically inept user will understand "WARNING! YOUR COMPUTER IS NOT RUNNING GOOGLE CHROME OS/HAS BEEN ALTERED FROM FACTORY DEFAULTS!" shown at boot time. Which is what Chromebooks do. All that's needed to make it into a usable device is to get rid of "Press space to wipe your device." > Tons of people use Android in its developer mode; and so people don’t take a security mindset toward using a rooted phone. Android security is catastrophic on factory settings already, so how you managed to blame the tiny proportion of users that root their phones to get rid of vendor bloatware for it is beyond me.

derefr 8y ago
> All but the most technically inept user will understand "WARNING! YOUR COMPUTER IS NOT RUNNING GOOGLE CHROME OS/HAS BEEN ALTERED FROM FACTORY DEFAULTS!" shown at boot time. No. Not if half† the Chromebooks people own emit that message. Users do not read. I know, it's hard to believe, but a large portion of average (not "most technically inept", average) users have never read a warning message on a screen in their lives. They see a warning message—and then they ask an authority figure what it means. They then classify whatever technobabble response they get into two executive-summary categories: either the warning means they should stop and wait for assistance; or the warning means nothing, and they should confirm whatever it's asking them to confirm and go on as per usual. After that, every time they see a prompt that looks like the one they asked about, they'll remember which of the two categories they surmised it to fall into, and that's what they'll do. Even if it's a prompt with different text. It looks the same—it gets the same treatment. The next time you see a non-IT person using Windows and they get a UAC prompt, observe what they do. Ask them why it came up, and why they reacted the way they did. They won't know. All they'll know is that someone once told them it's fine to ignore those and click Accept. If the ChromeOS boot screen is as common as Windows UAC, then it fails at its mission. That is why it makes it easy to un-root the device: because, if you have a boot screen that can "trick" average users into un-rooting a Chromebook, then you can't trust the average user around your rooted Chromebook to not accidentally wipe it, so you can't ever give the average user a rooted Chromebook as some kind of cheap kiosk (i.e. exactly what the author of the article was trying to do.) And so rooted Chromebooks "in the wild" are rare—rare enough that if any user ever sees that boot screen, it'll be a new error that no authority figure ever told them "the trick" to bypassing and getting on with their day. New enough that they'll either "fall for" the prompt and un-root the device; or they'll call someone over to ask what the prompt "means." ---- † Sure, far less than half of Android devices are rooted. But consider the demographic difference. Every human being has a potential reason to own an Android device. Right now, very few average human beings have a reason to own their own Chromebook. (Be assigned a Chromebook by an enterprise MDM system, sure. But own their own? Quite rare.) Ignoring the enterprise users, and taking the small slice of people who own their own Chromebook as the base population, any random niche use that requires rooting the Chromebook, if it got popular enough, could blow that population out of the water. If rooted Chromebooks turned out to be, say, good for running TAILS, or game emulators, or any other stupid thing you can think of, suddenly half the Chromebooks "in the wild" that a non-enterprise user ever sees would be doing that, and so would be rooted. They'd all beep and show the warning. And, like UAC, it'd be just another one of those things you ignore.

by deogeo 8y ago

derefr 8y ago

> All but the most technically inept user will understand "WARNING! YOUR COMPUTER IS NOT RUNNING GOOGLE CHROME OS/HAS BEEN ALTERED FROM FACTORY DEFAULTS!" shown at boot time. No. Not if half† the Chromebooks people own emit that message. Users do not read. I know, it's hard to believe, but a large portion of average (not "most technically inept", average) users have never read a warning message on a screen in their lives. They see a warning message—and then they ask an authority figure what it means. They then classify whatever technobabble response they get into two executive-summary categories: either the warning means they should stop and wait for assistance; or the warning means nothing, and they should confirm whatever it's asking them to confirm and go on as per usual. After that, every time they see a prompt that looks like the one they asked about, they'll remember which of the two categories they surmised it to fall into, and that's what they'll do. Even if it's a prompt with different text. It looks the same—it gets the same treatment. The next time you see a non-IT person using Windows and they get a UAC prompt, observe what they do. Ask them why it came up, and why they reacted the way they did. They won't know. All they'll know is that someone once told them it's fine to ignore those and click Accept. If the ChromeOS boot screen is as common as Windows UAC, then it fails at its mission. That is why it makes it easy to un-root the device: because, if you have a boot screen that can "trick" average users into un-rooting a Chromebook, then you can't trust the average user around your rooted Chromebook to not accidentally wipe it, so you can't ever give the average user a rooted Chromebook as some kind of cheap kiosk (i.e. exactly what the author of the article was trying to do.) And so rooted Chromebooks "in the wild" are rare—rare enough that if any user ever sees that boot screen, it'll be a new error that no authority figure ever told them "the trick" to bypassing and getting on with their day. New enough that they'll either "fall for" the prompt and un-root the device; or they'll call someone over to ask what the prompt "means." ---- † Sure, far less than half of Android devices are rooted. But consider the demographic difference. Every human being has a potential reason to own an Android device. Right now, very few average human beings have a reason to own their own Chromebook. (Be assigned a Chromebook by an enterprise MDM system, sure. But own their own? Quite rare.) Ignoring the enterprise users, and taking the small slice of people who own their own Chromebook as the base population, any random niche use that requires rooting the Chromebook, if it got popular enough, could blow that population out of the water. If rooted Chromebooks turned out to be, say, good for running TAILS, or game emulators, or any other stupid thing you can think of, suddenly half the Chromebooks "in the wild" that a non-enterprise user ever sees would be doing that, and so would be rooted. They'd all beep and show the warning. And, like UAC, it'd be just another one of those things you ignore.