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I'd rather have all software sandboxed by default. It's a much better solution than walled gardens or "blessed" packages.

The problem with this is that you'll always have exceptions, and eventually you have enough of them that users become accustomed to blindly hitting "Accept" to any permission dialogs.

If you keep a child out of the kitchen because the stove is hot, you'll protect them burning themselves, but you'll also prevent them from learning how to cook.

If people don't get the opportunity to fuck up, you arrest their development. Stupid software users then becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Users will become dumber than they ever were before, and therefore more and more reliant on software developers to do/make everything for them. In my cynical moments, I suspect this is all intentional... Imagine if the fast food industry were throwing their weight around to promote the idea that children should be kept out of kitchens.

This is a nice thought, but based on my experience helping non-technical people with malware and related issues, it's rare that they learn from those experiences, and instead delegate to the nearest techy person to help them fix it. So if people are going to act that way in either case, I would selfishly rather the software just prevent them from doing stupid things in the first place, before I get that call for help.

I think your reasoning here is flawed. People do not all need to develop skills in all aspects of life. By keeping someone from experiencing physical violence you may prevent them from learning how to defend themselves, but by many this would be considered a fair trade.

I believe the same is the case with limited control over technology. Most users do not care to learn, and would opt to actively avoid the opportunity to learn if the associated danger was removed for them.

In my opinion the best option is to remain in the current state by default and have a more obscure 'power user' option that could be enabled within the OS itself.

Serious question: why should anybody have to learn how a computer works?

I mean, I do it for a living and I'm glad I know.

But I don't really know how bridges, or electric guitars, or cars, or genetic engineering, or oil paintings work.

It's awfully gatekeeper-y to insist that computers should be these totally wide-open, unsafe spaces.

I mean it's almost exactly like saying people should know how to rebuild an engine if they want to drive a car.

It's certainly good to know how to rebuild an engine, but surely many people should be able to use cars without knowing that...

I like your car engine analogy; car's have the same level of widespread use as computers, yet I would wager a large percentage of people would struggle to perform much in term of car maintenance. Anecdotally, I know a multitude of people who have no idea how their car engine works, so much so they would not know how to check the oil level.

As a further point, drivers are (with edge case exceptions) not kept away or locked down from performing any work on their vehicle, yet in most cases they would still prefer to pass the responsibility on to a trusted professional.

It's certainly good to know how a car works, or a computer works.

Recently, I fixed a number of small (non-drivetrain) things on my car and I wish I knew more.

I don't know how workable this is in reality. Most software needs some kind of interoperability to be useful.

- Network access

- Direct hardware access (such as games accessing the GPU)

- Sharing data to other software

- Consuming data from other software

- etc.

As we've seen, we wind up needing to turn a bunch of these on for most software, and while it's certainly better than giving them carte blanche over the entire system, a handful of these permissions are enough to work some skullduggery.

> - Network access

Most software does not "need" network access, it just ends up being used for telemetry, serving ads, and checking for updates you probably don't need anyway.

> Direct hardware access (such as games accessing the GPU)

"Direct", meaning they need a context handle and some shared memory to get composited by the OS. Still, I'm honestly not sure why this isn't a solved problem today. Why are GPUs not virtualizable the way CPUs are?

> - Sharing data to other software > - Consuming data from other software

Software can be grouped together and allowed to talk among eachother within a certain context without giving any given piece of it the ability to burn the world down.

You'll have a hard time convincing me that taking control away from users is a better solution.

I would think that manually granting (or revoking) specific permissions on a per-software basis equals more control, not less!

I agree that users need full control. I also think a few decades of personal computing have shown us that the defaults should be pretty safe and therefore restrictive.

Users should have to jump through a hoop or two (perhaps as simple as `sudo enable-expert-mode` in a terminal, or some such) before being able to shoot themselves in the foot.

I think that one of the reason's we're behind on this is that major players aren't putting R&D into usable clusters of user managed permissions and tools for both power users and average users to manage and introspect them is precisely because they've found a way to both shirk the responsibility and exploit their users with an App Store.

As a result, all users are imperiled.

Windows wasn't unsafe to use, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express were unsafe to use. It had nothing to do with a lack of app stores, and more to do with the fact that ActiveX controls were allowed to run rampant on a machine, and that they could install themselves with a single dialog box that nobody ever paid attention to, and sometimes even bypass that.

I mean, even with an App Store, IE would have been pushed hard, just like Edge is now. And it still would have been a buggy mess, and people would have still been infected...

I can't believe I just defended Windows here...

I fixed hundreds, maybe thousands of machines infected with malware back in those days. Switching users to Firefox and a safe e-mail client nearly eliminated all of their issues.

But IE was baked into the system (eg Active Desktop) which is why Windows was insecure.

>Windows wasn't unsafe to use, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express were unsafe to use.

Here's [1] over 1000 CVEs in Windows 10 alone, many of quite critical nature and not related to IE or OE.

Here's [2] another 1200+ for Windows 7.

Here's [3] 741 for the "back in the day" Windows XP.

[1] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-26/p...

[2] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-26/p...

[3] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-26/p...

I remember plugging my windows box directly into my internet cable modem around 1999. My printer started printing dick pics (that I had not asked it to print) -- I had not even clicked on Internet Explorer.

I wasn't a computer person back then. But I quickly learned about SMB file and printer sharing being wide open.

PC Manufacturers literally installed said malware and spyware, which is what Android phone manufacturers do today. How is it a disaster if it is the past and current eco-system. Windows 10 comes with built in spyware and malware now.

> What do you think about compromises (like macOS, and Android) where non-blessed software is disabled by default, but can fairly easily be sideloaded?

I think that's exactly what the vast majority of people advocating for sideloading are proposing. At least it's what I'd propose.