Security for everyone? Apple Store edition (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Security for everyone? Apple Store edition (2015)

jessysaurusrex.com

31 pointsrdl11 comments

This is painful to read. After working in IT for five years, I am convinced that for the majority of "normal" people, computers are actually too powerful. Apple tries hard to make "appliance" computers, but it's all too easy to break even OS X.

iOS is much better. I am convinced that for the set of "normal people", the iPad is the ideal home computer. (Especially the Pro, where the stylus is an intuitive replacement for the mouse, and there is a pretty good external keyboard.)

ios is by far the most secure environment accessible to the vast majority of people.

My brother owns 4 restaurants. Five years ago, he almost had several hundred thousand dollars stolen from his business bank account because he got spyware installed on his laptop. The solution was buy a separate computer just for banking.

Now, the solution available to nearly everyone is buy an ios device, and never access your bank, investment, or credit card accounts through anything else. The locked down app store where users are entirely unable to install non-validated software is perfect for at least 99.9% of users.

And I know people here are upset you can't run any software you want. That does suck! But we've tried letting users do that for going on 40 years now, and it's been an unmitigated security disaster.

You actually can run any software you want on iOS - you just have to compile it yourself with XCode and sideload it. And this is a sufficiently high barrier to entry that it serves to protect the clueless.

That's basically Chromebooks for most people, and incidentally they just started outselling Macs.

Most of us "power users" will never be using one, but they're designed for people who aren't going to be personally maintaining their computer.

I love the idea behind ChromeOS, but the actual implementation is lacking in a lot of ways. Fundamentally being tied essentially exclusively to Google services just doesn't work for a lot of use cases.

It's probably fine for a lot of individuals in the US, and for K-12, but it's not great in a lot of overseas markets (Google services being blocked, etc.), and probably never a viable option for medium/large businesses.

(of course, "trust Google to run the infrastructure behind it" makes a lot more sense than "trust Asus or Samsung or Acer or HP or ...", or worse, "trust your carrier.")

I keep looking at them as they do look attractive. My kids and their teacher would probably do well with them in the classroom. But I just cannot sanction forcing them to use Google like that. My girls are 8 and 10, and it's already very hard to pushback against apps and privacy. I fear that, even if Google is OK today, giving them something like that would show them that it is OK to give up privacy, which sets a bad precedent.

But I know I'm fighting a losing battle and most people wouldn't even notice or care.

At least developer mode is easily accessible on most of the machines, allowing you to substitute Google's services if you wish. Though I would still prefer a native method of switching out the "root provider" to one of your own.

Chromebooks do the best job I've seen of being user friendly and solving the primary use case for millions of people: getting online. They're basically internet appliances, which speaks to their success -- after all, who needs help figuring out a fridge or oven once you've learned it once?

I also keep one (with developer mode + Ubuntu chroot) around because of the insane battery life. :)

Sorry if this is naive but what does Taylor Swift have to do with this story? I'm talking about her tweets. Not being fussy, I just generally don't know what the author means by the tweets.

https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity

Threatbutt is much more interesting than a line inside of some apple fix me store. http://threatbutt.com/map/

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