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I wouldn't want any text editor app to have full rights to my Google Drive. I literally recently implemented a similar feature (not for a text editor but for an

I wouldn't want any text editor app to have full rights to my Google Drive. I literally recently implemented a similar feature (not for a text editor but for an app that needed to pull files from many different sources), and it's not that hard, i.e. giving easy access to local files and then using the picker control for "Drive imports". The problem here is the original app developer had full, willy-nilly Drive access, and when Google rightfully locked down this level of access (and, mind you, didn't prohibit - I've gone through the Drive restricted scope verification process and it's not as hard as this blog post is making it out to be), the developer didn't take the time to see what was necessary to comply. Again, I have no doubt Google could have given better instructions on how to migrate to the drive.file scope or how to use the restricted scopes. But Google has been warning about this for many years now, so seems like this dev just scrambled at the last minute.

stickfigure 2y ago
> I wouldn't want any text editor app to have full rights to my Google Drive. What text editor do you use on your laptop/desktop/pc?
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  Primarily vim or VSCode, why?
  - klabb3 2y ago
    Parent means that your desktop OS is not sandboxed and your editor has permissions to read any file you have access to, including mounted Cloud Drives, as well as showing a custom file explorer (which both Vim and VSCode do, btw) and does not require special scoping on a file-by-file basis to happen in some OS controlled, confusing back-and-forth dance. The security model on mobile, despite being gate kept and sandboxed to an extreme, still has massive giant glaring problems with malware, phishing and tracking (although that’s more of a feature). To double down on this strategy, by whitelisting, reviewing, authorizing, auditing, and blessing entitlements in holy corporate water – shows an amusing incongruence in contrast with say Linux which by almost every metric is more secure despite none of that, and to a lesser extent, macOS and Windows.
    - Gigachad 2y ago
      Linux desktop is not secure at all. Basically anything you install can do anything without limitations. In a few minutes I could whip up a VSCode plugin that sends me your browser session storage and have access to all of your everything. It's getting a lot better with Flatpak, Wayland, and PipeWire, but the pieces are still being put in place for an actually secure Linux desktop that comes anywhere close to the security of MacOS and iOS.
      - Shawnecy 2y ago
        > Linux desktop is not secure at all. Basically anything you install can do anything without limitations. This is ridiculously false.
        Gigachad 2y ago
        Every traditional package manager I’ve seen installs programs as root and they can do basically everything including adding services to systemd as root, modifying configs in /etc for example. It’s only the newer stuff like flatpak that bring in some sanity to the installation process.
        consteval 2y ago
        While this is true, in practice it's more secure than you'd see on most operating systems. The reason being that the software is typically from a centralized, trusted repo that has been vetted by maintainers. The software is typically OS and it's not the app developer who releases it to you, the customer. It's the maintainer who packages it and will even apply custom fixes to it. Yes, there's some trust here. But historically, there's very little examples of rogue Debian maintainers doing something naughty. Whereas on, say, the Play Store, the app dev distributes the App to you and the Play Store just does some preliminary black-box checks. They're not getting the code and packaging it like a debian maintainer would. Some distros, like Debian, even FORCE app devs to use the system provided libs - they can't statically link their own library code. So they're pinned to a particular version of openSSL, libc, wlroots, libpng, etc. This prevents a huge variety of supply chain attacks. You can't bundle a compromised version of any one of the libs. And lastly, in stable distros the software typically goes through many routes before landing on a customer device. For debian, you're looking at months of real-world usage in testing and unstable before you see the software. This finds out vulnerabilities - this is why, for example, debian stable never had to deal with the XZ vuln. This isn't true for direct-to-customer app stores.
- Gigachad 2y ago
  On MacOS, apps like VSCode have to ask permission to read directories if they weren't opened via the OS file picker. So my text editor can not read my Google Drive folder unless I explicitly allow it to.
  - stickfigure 2y ago
    I don't know about VSCode, but IntelliJ and Sublime have access to files all over the filesystem (on MacOS). Maybe they once asked me for permissions "to all files" a zillion years ago - I don't remember - but isn't that exactly what the app developer in the article is asking for?

stickfigure 2y ago

> I wouldn't want any text editor app to have full rights to my Google Drive. What text editor do you use on your laptop/desktop/pc?

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
Primarily vim or VSCode, why?
- klabb3 2y ago
  Parent means that your desktop OS is not sandboxed and your editor has permissions to read any file you have access to, including mounted Cloud Drives, as well as showing a custom file explorer (which both Vim and VSCode do, btw) and does not require special scoping on a file-by-file basis to happen in some OS controlled, confusing back-and-forth dance. The security model on mobile, despite being gate kept and sandboxed to an extreme, still has massive giant glaring problems with malware, phishing and tracking (although that’s more of a feature). To double down on this strategy, by whitelisting, reviewing, authorizing, auditing, and blessing entitlements in holy corporate water – shows an amusing incongruence in contrast with say Linux which by almost every metric is more secure despite none of that, and to a lesser extent, macOS and Windows.
  - Gigachad 2y ago
    Linux desktop is not secure at all. Basically anything you install can do anything without limitations. In a few minutes I could whip up a VSCode plugin that sends me your browser session storage and have access to all of your everything. It's getting a lot better with Flatpak, Wayland, and PipeWire, but the pieces are still being put in place for an actually secure Linux desktop that comes anywhere close to the security of MacOS and iOS.
    - Shawnecy 2y ago
      > Linux desktop is not secure at all. Basically anything you install can do anything without limitations. This is ridiculously false.
      - Gigachad 2y ago
        Every traditional package manager I’ve seen installs programs as root and they can do basically everything including adding services to systemd as root, modifying configs in /etc for example. It’s only the newer stuff like flatpak that bring in some sanity to the installation process.
        consteval 2y ago
        While this is true, in practice it's more secure than you'd see on most operating systems. The reason being that the software is typically from a centralized, trusted repo that has been vetted by maintainers. The software is typically OS and it's not the app developer who releases it to you, the customer. It's the maintainer who packages it and will even apply custom fixes to it. Yes, there's some trust here. But historically, there's very little examples of rogue Debian maintainers doing something naughty. Whereas on, say, the Play Store, the app dev distributes the App to you and the Play Store just does some preliminary black-box checks. They're not getting the code and packaging it like a debian maintainer would. Some distros, like Debian, even FORCE app devs to use the system provided libs - they can't statically link their own library code. So they're pinned to a particular version of openSSL, libc, wlroots, libpng, etc. This prevents a huge variety of supply chain attacks. You can't bundle a compromised version of any one of the libs. And lastly, in stable distros the software typically goes through many routes before landing on a customer device. For debian, you're looking at months of real-world usage in testing and unstable before you see the software. This finds out vulnerabilities - this is why, for example, debian stable never had to deal with the XZ vuln. This isn't true for direct-to-customer app stores.
Gigachad 2y ago
On MacOS, apps like VSCode have to ask permission to read directories if they weren't opened via the OS file picker. So my text editor can not read my Google Drive folder unless I explicitly allow it to.
- stickfigure 2y ago
  I don't know about VSCode, but IntelliJ and Sublime have access to files all over the filesystem (on MacOS). Maybe they once asked me for permissions "to all files" a zillion years ago - I don't remember - but isn't that exactly what the app developer in the article is asking for?