The problem has a good solution, but getting people to adopt it is unlikely to happen. It is to simply adopt systems which are not based on ambient authority, a

The problem has a good solution, but getting people to adopt it is unlikely to happen. It is to simply adopt systems which are not based on ambient authority, and simply use the least privilege possible to accomplish a task. This has been known since the 1970s, when we learned it in the US in response to issues during the Viet Nam conflict. The closest analogy I can give to the state of things right now is to imagine our current power grid with absolutely NO fuses or circuit breakers. Instead of assuming that a circuit somewhere could be compromised, we've invested millions of human lifetimes being very careful about what we connect to the grid. Houses and businesses would routinely burn to the ground, power outages would be commonplace across all scales, any time a circuit fault developed, anywhere. Instead of giving every device plugged into every outlet everywhere full access to all the power available on the grid, we use circuit protection. You're not going to be able to power a factory from a single 120V single phase outlet, but you can do useful work with it. Thanks to fuses, circuit breakers, and the like, you can effectively use any outlet in your home for almost any conceivable use, without worry. The same is obviously not true for computers, and running programs, although it used to be true! Back in the early days of computing, we had systems which didn't have a single persistent mass storage. Because we booted off of removable and write-protectable media, it was possible to have a "known good" boot image, and make copies of it. It was always possible to bring the system up in a known good state. It was always known what disks were at risk for corruption, as they were the ones in the disk drives without write protection. You couldn't corrupt disks that weren't in the drives. Sanity was easy to preserve, and we routinely purchased tons of software and just tried it out without a worry. Thanks to hard drives, and now SSDs that can't be write protected, we'll never be that safe again. Especially when our operating systems can't enforce write protection on even their own code. We can fix it, but my personal estimate of when that would happen is about passed now.... I figured it would be about 2025, but these days I'm not sure it'll ever happen at all. Edit/Append - Apparently there are forensic USB3 bridges which could be used to make your media actually read-only. They aren't cheap, though. That's half the problem, the other half is in the OS, and the Genode project (a Capabilities based Operating System) is going to spend 2024 focusing on usability, so a solution might actually be at hand.