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How do you make something that isn't trivially turned to oppression without allowing users a trivial escape from the devices protection model? Isn't installing

How do you make something that isn't trivially turned to oppression without allowing users a trivial escape from the devices protection model? Isn't installing your own OS on your general purpose computer a trivial out? Shall we likewise disable that ability on all general purpose computers?

shadowgovt 3y ago
Sometimes oppression could come from a central authority, and sometimes it can come from a rampant criminal element taking advantage of exploitable human behavior. We have to balance defending against both. > Shall we likewise disable that ability Not on all computers, no. But I should have the option of buying my grandmother one which is very, very hard for someone to convince her to give them admin rights.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  This use case is well served by a non admin user as opposed to a machine where Dell is the root user. Furthermore what you desire for your grandmother is liable to be imposed on the rest of us if we want the privilege of banking or Netflix and in many cases grossly abused especially in less free countries including ours should we in the US fall into fascism. You would build chains for millions of people so that granny will have to give scammers her money some less convenient way. I'd rather not.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    I think that really overstates the risk scenario. If we're going to descend into hyperbole, let's turn it around... If a free and open device is so important, won't some smart hacker always come along to build one? I'd rather my grandmother have an easy life and trust that Neo will be around to save the technorati eventually than make life easier on people who already know how to hack things they want to behave differently at the cost of my grandmother's sense of ease and well-being.
    - michaelmrose 3y ago
      > If a free and open device is so important, won't some smart hacker always come along to build one? This just isn't how the universe works at all. We both grew up in the era roughly analogous to the early era of flight with 100 bad designs competing for most incompetent and are now moving into the an era of commercial jets and here you are arguing that planes wont make a difference in war. If you build an ecosystem where essential services like logging into your work, watching netflix, and banking require you to use locked down devices in which the OEM could be forced to build ANY restriction into the device but mostly use it to keep you from trivialities in the US and Europe you wont notice you've built a tool suitable for any oppression nor will you notice until the frog is well boiled. We have the bones of damn near total control in terms of difficult to root devices, remote attestation to ensure you actually are using such a device, AI to analyze data at scale. The difference between the tools we have now and 1984 is that the telescreen didn't sit in your pocket nor was Big Brother literally listening 100% of the time to 100% of the people. We are describing a literal system you could roll out without inventing anything purely based on existing technology and if you too live in the US then we are doing so in a country that has at least a 1 in 3 chance of descending into a fascist state.
      - shadowgovt 3y ago
        I mean... Netflix is clearly part of the larger control scheme in the scenario where the country is fascist, even as it is currently constructed. For everyone else, there'll be BitTorrent through VPN and good ol' fashion swapping of hard drives of bootlegs.
ori_b 3y ago
> Shall we likewise disable that ability on all general purpose computers? It's being worked on with web attestation.
paulmd 3y ago
Apple honestly did a pretty good job. You can sideload your own code with a free developer account, but you have to jump through some minor hoops to get “developer” mode set on your account (I went through this to get the tvOS 17 beta). And the app signing expires in 7 days, so it’s really painful for a normal user who isn’t actually developing and testing an app to use like that for a long term thing. If you want more than that, you can pay $99 for a real developer account and that will let you sign apps for up to a year. And that’s a sufficient barrier that Facebook can’t be like “you have to sign up for a dev account if you want to use Facebook!” and expect the average user to just blindly comply. Cause that’s the problem with the EU approach, it works ok when it’s only the EU, but Facebook really wants to bypass those permissions (they’ve already bribed users to install dev credential builds that have full permissions, so they could datamine more effectively), and the moment they can lever open the app-review process with “third party app stores” is the moment the “doesn’t work on iOS, please sideload the native app” banner goes up on Facebook.com. It doesn’t have to be financial but the only alternatives would be some kind of credential verification thing like looking at your LinkedIn or a college transcript or a GitHub account to validate that you’re actually a bona fide developer and not just grandma who got an iTunes gift card to install the spyware build (real example from Facebook). https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/apple-bans-facebook-vpn/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/apple-bans-facebook-vpn/am...
- JimDabell 3y ago
  > Apple honestly did a pretty good job. They did. Over here, there are regular news articles and warnings from the government as yet more Android users get conned into installing fake banking app APKs that let attackers steal all their money. It’s always the same news article and the same warning – only Android users affected. Elsewhere in this thread, people are saying that you can’t protect people from themselves… but Apple seem to be doing a good job of it. When was the last time a side-loaded IPA stole bank credentials from iPhone users? I personally think that Apple should be a little more open. Having some sort of developer mode with plenty of warnings would be better. But the idea that Apple’s approach doesn’t improve security in meaningful ways to the average user is wishful thinking based more in ideology than what actually happens in the real world.

shadowgovt 3y ago

Sometimes oppression could come from a central authority, and sometimes it can come from a rampant criminal element taking advantage of exploitable human behavior. We have to balance defending against both. > Shall we likewise disable that ability Not on all computers, no. But I should have the option of buying my grandmother one which is very, very hard for someone to convince her to give them admin rights.

michaelmrose 3y ago
This use case is well served by a non admin user as opposed to a machine where Dell is the root user. Furthermore what you desire for your grandmother is liable to be imposed on the rest of us if we want the privilege of banking or Netflix and in many cases grossly abused especially in less free countries including ours should we in the US fall into fascism. You would build chains for millions of people so that granny will have to give scammers her money some less convenient way. I'd rather not.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  I think that really overstates the risk scenario. If we're going to descend into hyperbole, let's turn it around... If a free and open device is so important, won't some smart hacker always come along to build one? I'd rather my grandmother have an easy life and trust that Neo will be around to save the technorati eventually than make life easier on people who already know how to hack things they want to behave differently at the cost of my grandmother's sense of ease and well-being.
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    > If a free and open device is so important, won't some smart hacker always come along to build one? This just isn't how the universe works at all. We both grew up in the era roughly analogous to the early era of flight with 100 bad designs competing for most incompetent and are now moving into the an era of commercial jets and here you are arguing that planes wont make a difference in war. If you build an ecosystem where essential services like logging into your work, watching netflix, and banking require you to use locked down devices in which the OEM could be forced to build ANY restriction into the device but mostly use it to keep you from trivialities in the US and Europe you wont notice you've built a tool suitable for any oppression nor will you notice until the frog is well boiled. We have the bones of damn near total control in terms of difficult to root devices, remote attestation to ensure you actually are using such a device, AI to analyze data at scale. The difference between the tools we have now and 1984 is that the telescreen didn't sit in your pocket nor was Big Brother literally listening 100% of the time to 100% of the people. We are describing a literal system you could roll out without inventing anything purely based on existing technology and if you too live in the US then we are doing so in a country that has at least a 1 in 3 chance of descending into a fascist state.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      I mean... Netflix is clearly part of the larger control scheme in the scenario where the country is fascist, even as it is currently constructed. For everyone else, there'll be BitTorrent through VPN and good ol' fashion swapping of hard drives of bootlegs.

ori_b 3y ago

> Shall we likewise disable that ability on all general purpose computers? It's being worked on with web attestation.

paulmd 3y ago

Apple honestly did a pretty good job. You can sideload your own code with a free developer account, but you have to jump through some minor hoops to get “developer” mode set on your account (I went through this to get the tvOS 17 beta). And the app signing expires in 7 days, so it’s really painful for a normal user who isn’t actually developing and testing an app to use like that for a long term thing. If you want more than that, you can pay $99 for a real developer account and that will let you sign apps for up to a year. And that’s a sufficient barrier that Facebook can’t be like “you have to sign up for a dev account if you want to use Facebook!” and expect the average user to just blindly comply. Cause that’s the problem with the EU approach, it works ok when it’s only the EU, but Facebook really wants to bypass those permissions (they’ve already bribed users to install dev credential builds that have full permissions, so they could datamine more effectively), and the moment they can lever open the app-review process with “third party app stores” is the moment the “doesn’t work on iOS, please sideload the native app” banner goes up on Facebook.com. It doesn’t have to be financial but the only alternatives would be some kind of credential verification thing like looking at your LinkedIn or a college transcript or a GitHub account to validate that you’re actually a bona fide developer and not just grandma who got an iTunes gift card to install the spyware build (real example from Facebook). https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/apple-bans-facebook-vpn/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/apple-bans-facebook-vpn/am...

JimDabell 3y ago
> Apple honestly did a pretty good job. They did. Over here, there are regular news articles and warnings from the government as yet more Android users get conned into installing fake banking app APKs that let attackers steal all their money. It’s always the same news article and the same warning – only Android users affected. Elsewhere in this thread, people are saying that you can’t protect people from themselves… but Apple seem to be doing a good job of it. When was the last time a side-loaded IPA stole bank credentials from iPhone users? I personally think that Apple should be a little more open. Having some sort of developer mode with plenty of warnings would be better. But the idea that Apple’s approach doesn’t improve security in meaningful ways to the average user is wishful thinking based more in ideology than what actually happens in the real world.