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fragmede

There was a bug in an uninstaller, once, that deleted all of the files on the disk. Sounds like malware to me!

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Someone found a reference to this! Wasn't quite all the files on disk, "just" C:\program files\, but still!

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/i-tried-to-uninstall-s...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37566895

There was a bug in some Linux driver installer that accidentally /usr, the whole thing.

"Totally uncool dude!!!"

Why does a third party app have rights all files without asking? The Android app rights system integration into linux and windows is way overdue

I'm fairly sure Android apps running as root (like this driver installer probably was) will also have access over all files without asking. That's the danger of root.

Android apps themselves can't run as root. The apps that do perform operations "as root" do so by spawning a shell process running as root, usually using `su -c`. That's on a rooted device. Normally, all privileged actions are done by system daemons that run with appropriate permissions and that apps communicate with through the "binder" IPC mechanism. Those daemons also handle access control — both the regular Android permissions and the god mode for "system privileged" apps.

Thanks for the explanatin, I'd never looked into it.

> The apps that do perform operations "as root" do so by spawning a shell process running as root, usually using `su -c`. That's on a rooted device.

So in a scenario like what we're discussing here (a dev deciding to build an uninstaller their own way), on a rooted device (as per the GP's context of "this coming to Linux and Windows"), the app in question could still run as root, and this permission set from Android would solve nothing?

An app that has root access can grant permissions to itself. It can as well remount /system as writable and make itself privileged by copying its apk to /system/priv-app

It's a driver that probably includes a kernel module. It's expected that its installer runs as root.

EVE online's patcher once deleted boot.ini (a file configuring their launcher that they stopped needing) without checking the working directory which caused it to delete C:\Windows\system32\boot.ini which was important to booting the then current Windows version.

It's impressive how incredibly bad the code must have been for that to happen

System32 is the default directory for cmd. Might have something to do with that.

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