4 ms·

It’s not an evil at all. For 99% of people who aren’t “computer people”, when we gave them that, we got the Bonzai Buddy and 47 other malware toolbars installe

• LoganDark 10mo ago
  The problem is mostly that normal people can't be trusted with system-level access but some people can. And it's literally, provably not possible to tell them apart. For the masses, lack of system-level access is a benefit because they won't be able to ruin their device. For hackers and hobbyists, lack of system-level access is a hindrance because they won't be able to control their device.
  • hephaes7us 10mo ago
    In other areas of life, people self-select at their own risk. You can diagnose medical issues yourself, buy power tools you don't know how to use safely, and invest in assets that you don't understand. All other things being equal, we should try to protect people. But we shouldn't force everyone to make the choices that are best for the people with the least comprehension of what they're doing.
    • GabrielHawk 10mo ago
      Have you ever seen government officials talk about tech? I think you'd have to be naive to buy the narrative that they're making such a large policy decision for our security. Of the few people using rooted phones to begin with, there's even fewer that don't know what they're doing. Much more likely is this is a decision to get in line with the well documented and rapidly spreading surveillance laws of the past few years. > But we shouldn't force everyone to make the choices that are best for the people with the least comprehension of what they're doing. You are acting like it's easy to accidentally root your phone
      • hephaes7us 10mo ago
        It's not that I believe it, it's that that would be the only legitimate justification, and I'm don't suggesting even _that_ doesn't hold water.
    • sneak 10mo ago
      You can’t freely sell devices to let others self-diagnose medical issues, so this part of your analogy doesn’t hold up in the case of phone sales. We also limit investing in certain types of investments to so-called “accredited investors” which is just legal jargon for “millionaires”. I don’t think the point you are trying to make about letting people own-goal is as strong as you think it is. (I would have gone with “roulette is legal”, which is a better one that the investment one, as the accredited investor rule is in all 50 states.)
      • hephaes7us 10mo ago
        I'm not certain what you're advocating for here? If you are interested in the public good, I think it is pretty clear that we should ban roulette overnight since it has a negative expected value for everyone but the casino. On the other hand (still presuming you're interested in the public good), I think you have to consider very carefully whether it's good or bad to lock people out of investments or to restrict people's access to health care.
  • kakacik 10mo ago
    Non-ideal situation for those power users - have 2 phones. Annoying but also a perfect separation of free/personal and controlled/official spaces.
  • drnick1 10mo ago
    > normal people can't be trusted with system-level access but some people can. Why can "normal people" be trusted with a car then? Or firearms? Or kitchen knives?
    • sneak 10mo ago
      Well, normal people generally can’t be trusted with cars: in one country of only 3.5% of the humans we kill two jumbo jets worth of people with them every day. Tylenol is another example. Building materials is a third (building and fire codes are a relatively recent invention). Hell, even penicillin is by prescription only. Letting the circumstance happen where median people can easily cause externalities through ignorance or carelessness is how we incinerated the planet and destroyed the biosphere as we know it with fossil fuel emissions, because it’s nbd (still even now in 2026, when we know about runaway polar greenhouse curves) to get in your ICE car and drive to the corner store. When normal people had GP computers, we got botnets millions strong and DDoS in the Tbit/sec range and keyloggers on every hotel lobby computer hooked up to the boarding pass printer. Median people are way safer on the internet now than before.
      • yibg 10mo ago
        That seems like an untenable stance. Most people don't pick healthy foods to eat or exercise as much as they should. Should we dictate what they can and cannot eat etc?
      • tzs 10mo ago
        > Well, normal people generally can’t be trusted with cars: in one country of only 3.5% of the humans we kill two jumbo jets worth of people with them every day. If you mean Indonesia (the county closest to 3.5% of the human population) or the US (the nearest above 3.5% at 4.1%+) then you are high by an order of magnitude. Two jumbo jets are around 1000 people. US car deaths are around 100 a day and Indonesia is a little lower. If you mean Pakistan (the next country after Indonesia at 2.9%) you are high by close to two orders of magnitude. They have around 15 deaths a day.
    • LoganDark 10mo ago
  • deleted 10mo ago
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  • ambicapter 10mo ago
    If the only damage is personal (they lose their own money), why can't we make them responsible for their choices?
    • BobaFloutist 10mo ago
      Because enough people losing their own money in the same way becomes a social ill. Much in the same way we try to limit physical addiction, which hypothetically only affects the person taking the substance, and gambling (though we're moving backwards on sports betting). Some hypothetical social ills: 1 If it's a good source of money, it becomes more ubiquitous. This leads to entire illegal markets, which will typically lead to additional crimes, up to and including human trafficking, slavery, organ harvesting, and murder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scam_center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scam_center. 2. The victims of scams will often feed shared or even stolen assets into the scam, desperately relying on an eventual return that will never come. This mirrors one of the better known social ills of gambling and addiction. 3. Even for people that never fall victim, defending against scams is tiring, irritating, and damages social fabric. An easy example is how spam cuts down on the utility of phone calls. In general, to be safe you have to be almost irrationally suspicious of anyone being surprisingly friendly, which makes non in-person connections -one of the greatest benefits of the internet - much harder and more dangerous to forge. What do you think, is that enough reasons?
      • TeMPOraL 10mo ago
        For sake of completeness, another important reason: 4. These kinds of "social ills" hypothetically affecting only individuals, actually spill over to affect their families, and, at scale, communities. That being said, in most cases it still doesn't justify this level of drastic intervention. Otherwise, cigarettes and alcohol and even Lotto would've been banned out of existence by fiat.
      • deaux 10mo ago
        So let's advance the much bigger societal ill of smartphone addiction by making people more reliant on them. No, your reasons are laughably bad, because the societal damage caused by these scams isn't even 5% of the societal damage caused by smartphone addiction in general, and not even 1% of "general smartphone addiction" + "tiktok/instagram/infinite scroll video feed addiction" + "gacha game addiction". Let alone "(sports) betting app addiction" for the many countries where this is a thing.
  • Am4TIfIsER0ppos 10mo ago
    Normal people shouldn't have computers. The internet must be made back into something you sit down to use.
• wolvoleo 10mo ago
  > App sandboxing and system file integrity is one of the most beneficial security features of modern computing, You can have sandboxing and system integrity while still giving the user overrides. But hey this is not Google and Apple's business model because it makes you less dependent on them. And it interferes with their sweet 30% rent-seeking app stores. Mobile security works this way not because it's best for us but because it's best for making them money. > You can buy rootable phones. Eh yeah but the problem is of course being locked out of apps if you actually root it. I don't want Google or Apple to decide what I can do with my phone. Or the government like in this case. This also opens the door for evil spyware like chatcontrol in europe. Even today they are trying to enforce a backdoor into whatsapp to block "harmful content" which is of course impossible without breaking or circumventing the E2E on-device. > People overwhelmingly choose iPhones instead. Maybe in America, not here in Spain. I guess not in Vietnam either.
  • leobg 10mo ago
    The irony is that Apple started out by discovering the the hackability of the hardware and software they found in their time. Instead of leaving something like that behind for those who come after them, to pay back what was given to them, they build walled gardens where you’re just not allowed to “bump into the walls too much”.
  • sneak 10mo ago
    > You can have sandboxing and system integrity while still giving the user overrides. I think this is wishful thinking, and the most experienced organizations in the world in this field agree with me. You can’t square this circle. We can pretend that these two things can coexist, but they cannot. Where there are overrides, there are youtube tutorials on how to disable the overrides to install malicious botnet vpn surveillance proxy apps to get free robux. (to borrow a turn of phrase from @ptacek iirc) If you give users an escape hatch, they will get malware in ring 0 and Apple Pay will stop being a thing because people’s cards will start getting remotely skimmed at scale. (Or Amazon will give you 1.5% off all purchases to install a rootkit that uploads your complete realtime cc nfc purchase boop history and email receipts and location track so they can figure out which businesses to clone/dump on next.) If you say “…but not the SEP” then you’re just admitting that you need a part of the phone the user does not and cannot control. Most users care about the privacy of their nudes and sexts so they’d rather it be the whole damn phone. Did we forget that even the not-full-scale escape hatch that was enterprise app certs was abused by Meta (then Facebook) to install surveillance VPN backdoors on customer phones at scale? Apple didn’t even know bc they were sideloading them via enterprise certs and when they found out they revoked them across the board, but by then thousands of people had had 100% of their phone’s network traffic surveilled by an ad company without consent.
• hephaes7us 10mo ago
  The evil is enshrining other people's choices into law, unnecessarily. There was never going to be anything preventing non-technical folks from buying iPhones. They can and should have what they like. Why should there be a law that forces that same compromise onto anyone who can only afford a single device and needs to use it to access their bank?
  • pie_flavor 10mo ago
    Because when you don't do this, people get scammed out of money. If there is a series of buttons you can press to circumvent the anti-scam measures, then the scammers simply walk you through pressing those buttons. If you cover them in giant warning labels the scammers simply add explanations into their patter. The buttons must physically not exist, for gullible people to not get scammed out of money. The next response will be 'well maybe we shouldn't accommodate them'. They vote, and there's more of them than you.
    • LorenPechtel 10mo ago
      Or rig screens such that the buttons do not appear to be what they are. I've seen many a install-this-app ads where cancel isn't cancel. The average user simply does not have the skill to determine real from fake and any heuristics to do so will be defeated by the scammers. You have to be able to understand what could be done with access, not what's "intended" with the access.
    • lxgr 10mo ago
      > Because when you don't do this, people get scammed out of money. No, only when you don't do this and nothing else to improve security. You're presenting a false dichotomy. > If there is a series of buttons you can press to circumvent the anti-scam measures, then the scammers simply walk you through pressing those buttons. If the scammers can walk somebody through doing all that, why would they stop at just asking them to send money over to them "to safekeep it because of a compromised account" or whatever the social engineering scheme of the week is?
    • thewebguyd 10mo ago
• Brian_K_White 10mo ago
  It is an evil because there are infinite ways to solve any problem, not just this one. Describing some problem in no way validates any particular response as being even worth the trade-off let alone flat out necessary and unavoidable. Further, the people promulgating this sort of solution know this. The evil is that they are wittingly using a problem as the excuse and the cover to get something else they want which they would otherwise never get and have no right to. For everyone who is doing this knowingly, there are countless other sincere but unwitting tools haplessly just buying the line sold to them. So you might be able to say you are not evil for supporting this kind of policy, but all that means is that you are either a witting or unwitting tool of the evil policy. "Rapes happen behind closed doors, therefore we have to remove all doors. No one denies that rape happens and that it's a bad thing. And it's irrerfutable that without doors that close, no one would be able to get away with a rape. And so, the only grown-up thing to do is agree to give up doors that close. It's not an evil at all."
  • unparagoned 10mo ago
    There must might be infinite ways but only one simple, reliable and practical way
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 10mo ago
  "I don't like Bonzi Buddy so people should be prevented from installing it."
  • Melonai 10mo ago
    Okay, it is a full on spyware virus though, not super sure why people would love Bonzi on their system. This is kind of a shitty compromise, the second you leave a tiny crack open in the security, maybe through root access, maybe some better sideloading, somehow people WILL be tricked into installing malware, and it baffles me... I've seen it happen multiple times with my older (and younger, though less often) relatives and acquaintances, I'm really not sure how like a solid 5 dialogs that scream at them with sayings like "do not do this", "this is dangerous", "if someone is telling you to do this they're a scammer", and that somehow raises zero alarms, however if you tell them to consider the possibility that they're downloading a virus, or that the nice IT man on the phone is probably not that trustworthy, they will simply not believe you. That's why I kind of get the paranoia, though most of it is just that and I really believe that software freedom is a whole lot more important.
    • deleted 10mo ago
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