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Sandboxing on iOS and Android is working great to prevent the spyware developers from achieving their goals. And now macOS is adding more of the same protectio

• jschwartzi 7y ago
  No, it just means you need to create a social network to install spyware.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• BeetleB 7y ago
  > Sandboxing on iOS and Android is working great to prevent the spyware developers from achieving their goals. For power users who use Tasker, Android's restrictions are a nightmare. I cannot, for example, kill an app using Tasker, and I really really need to do this. Plenty of other restrictions that made Tasker users' life difficult. To be clear, this is on a rooted phone. Am I not allowed to algorithmically decide to kill an app on my own phone?
  • acdha 7y ago
    Do even 0.1% of Android users use Tasker? 100% of them are at risk from malware and spyware which would directly access your data and other apps if not sandboxed. This could be somewhat addressed with different sandbox policies for well-audited applications but we've seen a long history of those lines being pushed as far as possible (e.g. Uber trying to use geo-fencing to evade reviewers). As an aside, I'm curious what makes killing an app so critical vs. only shutting down background processes. That seems like an edge case on an edge case?
    • BeetleB 7y ago
      > Do even 0.1% of Android users use Tasker? This thread is about power users, not average users. If I sold you a Linux PC, and gave you root access, but it was sandboxed and you couldn't kill apps from the command line, would you say the PC I gave you is fine for "power users"?
      • acdha 7y ago
        You have to think about how these capabilities are abused for something with as much personal data as a phone: if that capability is there it will be abused by malware, abusive partners, unscrupulous app vendors, snooping governments, etc. to impact orders of magnitude more people than believe they need these features. People will be trained to click approve the next time they install spyware or bogus optimization / cleanup utilities and many of the people most likely to be exploited will be the loudest about saying they're power users who need this access and won't make mistakes (see past decades of Windows usage).
        • thaumasiotes 7y ago
          > You have to think about how these capabilities are abused for something with as much personal data as a phone The computer has more personal data than the phone does, often by huge margins.
          • CDSlice 7y ago
            For power users maybe, but I honestly doubt that most people keep more personal data on computers than they do their phones.
            • thaumasiotes 7y ago
              My mother is terrified of computers. But she stores all her documents and old email archives on the computer, not on the phone.
              • acdha 7y ago
                Do you think there are more people like that than there are people who use their phone as their only device, not to mention the difference between a computer which often turned off or not physically present versus a device which is almost always on and near its owner?
  • flukus 7y ago
    Sand boxing is a power user thing, non power users don't understand it, don't even look at permissions let alone understand them, they just learn to click yes to everything to make stuff happen. It's a solution created by power users, only usable by power users that gets in the way of power users.