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"The sandbox made software safe. Installing software on a PC is a risk. When you install an app, it can do anything to your computer, no restrictions. This desi
by GTP 5y ago
"The sandbox made software safe. Installing software on a PC is a risk. When you install an app, it can do anything to your computer, no restrictions. This design choice was enormously generative, and enabled the open-ended evolution of whole new product categories. It also enabled the evolution of viruses. The web was globally networked, and could not assume every link was safe. Code on the web was sandboxed—trapped in a bubble—and it could only interact with your computer through carefully controlled APIs."
I don't agree with this paragraph. There are many ways to constrain what a native application can do on a PC and conversely there are many ways a malicious website could harm you using Javascript.
- eptcyka 5y agoAside from running a native application in a VM, most other sandboxing solutions are escapable, mostly because no mainstream desktop OS was architected with sandboxing in mind. Jails are as good as we got, and even then the kernel is far too insecure IMO. Its very hard to support a POSIX api and then retrofit sandboxing. And with VMs, there are numerous escapes, its just another frontier of security issues, not unlike browsers. But browsers were built with sandboxing as a core part of the design, and if you were to not use the newer, far buggier APIs, like Bluetooth and WebGPU, I'd argue that the browser would be relatively safe for a layperson. And much more practical than a VM.
- 0xCMP 5y agoOnly by technical people and with massive tradeoffs. For example the fact that applications could until very recently read any file almost anywhere on the computer that the user could. Even if, clearly, that application had no reason to be able to read that file in particular.