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Yeah and the worst thing about this is that if anything, the trend is towards having less ownership rights on the desktop as well. Windows 11 and newer mac OS

by skohan 5y ago

Yeah and the worst thing about this is that if anything, the trend is towards having less ownership rights on the desktop as well. Windows 11 and newer mac OS versions make it harder to run arbitrary software, under the guise of security. A legal battle around securing the rights of ownership is severely needed in the 21st century, the same way the creation of the EPA and workers rights legislation were needed in the 20th.

nouveaux 5y ago
"under the guise of security" Security is a tradeoff between freedom/convenience and safety. This is true outside of desktop OS as well. The reason there is a trend to having less rights and more security on the desktop is because of the rising cost of getting hacked. So unless you have a better solution, organizations and consumers will all advocate for more security and less freedom.
- skohan 5y ago
  I think the solution is a better access control model for operating systems. If applications are sandboxed effectively, and users are asked to opt in to specific permissions in a granular way, the risk is not so high. To paint an example, as a default an a process should only have access to its own memory, and maybe a sandboxed directory in the filesystem. If the process wants to access the network, or access other directories, it should ask me as the user permission before it can do so. You could then imagine extending this through a federated trust model. I.e. if I as a user don't want to bother with granting fine grained permissions each time, I could give blanket trust to all applications verified by a given source. This could be for instance a 3rd party app store, or something like a package manager, which I trust to vet the applications which it hosts. There are always going to be challenges with security, but the solution cannot be that 3 corporations get to unilaterally decide which code is allowed to be executed.

by skohan 5y ago

nouveaux 5y ago

"under the guise of security" Security is a tradeoff between freedom/convenience and safety. This is true outside of desktop OS as well. The reason there is a trend to having less rights and more security on the desktop is because of the rising cost of getting hacked. So unless you have a better solution, organizations and consumers will all advocate for more security and less freedom.

skohan 5y ago
I think the solution is a better access control model for operating systems. If applications are sandboxed effectively, and users are asked to opt in to specific permissions in a granular way, the risk is not so high. To paint an example, as a default an a process should only have access to its own memory, and maybe a sandboxed directory in the filesystem. If the process wants to access the network, or access other directories, it should ask me as the user permission before it can do so. You could then imagine extending this through a federated trust model. I.e. if I as a user don't want to bother with granting fine grained permissions each time, I could give blanket trust to all applications verified by a given source. This could be for instance a 3rd party app store, or something like a package manager, which I trust to vet the applications which it hosts. There are always going to be challenges with security, but the solution cannot be that 3 corporations get to unilaterally decide which code is allowed to be executed.