I certainly agree that there is a social/education angle to this as well, and in many ways that is the hard part. Just look at the usability problems with Micro

I certainly agree that there is a social/education angle to this as well, and in many ways that is the hard part. Just look at the usability problems with Microsoft’s early attempts at UAC on Windows, or how many people give permissions for all kinds of things on auto-pilot when using mobile devices. Still, you can’t start to educate even sensible, cautious users about how to make informed decisions if you don’t first have a robust technical security framework so you know what decisions need to be made. Also, we could tighten restrictions on applications without requiring any extra user understanding or interaction at all in quite a few useful cases. For example, suppose we distinguished between installing general applications and system tools, with the latter meaning third party software that really does need unusual levels of access to system resources, such as security or disk management utilities. Suppose also that we restricted general applications severely in terms of low-level access to system resources. Now all a web browser or e-mail client has to do to benefit from improved security is initially install as a general application, which is presumably the default behaviour and requires no interaction with or notification of the user. Any malware that subsequently finds its way into that application and tries to access restricted system resources or APIs is assumed to be hostile and gets killed immediately, with no need for user interaction then either.