Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

The corporate FUD has gotten strong enough that people are getting scared of freedom. That should disturb you more than any perceived paranoia about "attackers".

View on HN

Seriously, people are acting like the "do you want to give this application elevated privileges" popup is some arcane magick that we as a race can never hope to possess.

While I agree with you, without using a more granular permission paradigm I get more than a little antsy giving third-party software arbitrary access to even my standard user's privileges on Windows.

I've been using a dedicated computer for banking / finance work for a few years now. I also run some software that I consider less trustworthy on my "daily driver" Windows PC as a dedicated user, separate from my "daily driver" account.

I really need to make the jump to Qubes. I've been meaning to for years. The learning curve for their contrivances seems steep and I'm lazy.

Oh yeah, definitely, but mobile OSes do this fairly well. Windows just asks if you want to give access to everything or not, of course you're always going to click yes, especially if the program doesn't work without it.

There's plenty of actually granular permissions; they're just not used by anyone.

How many people on Windows create separate user accounts, run programs as those accounts (hello runas), & set ACLs?

Not many, but I have found Sandboxie to be quite useful for this purpose.

It’s not user friendly

It sure isn't. Although its competition is stuff like chmod (way less granular), and SELinux, and SELinux isn't winning any usability competitions either.

Five minutes after this popup exists, you won't be able to run any of the big "can't participate in your social life without these" apps anymore without granting them those elevated privileges.

I'm in the EU, that doesn't fly here.

This is half the reason I pick Apple stuff. Having a huge company fight the bullshit from Meta and Google for you.

That really should not surprise people when their smartphone has been telling them it is the wrong design pattern for over a decade.

Point the finger at whoever you want. If you need to find who broke the bicycle for the mind, I think most of us know who's responsible.

I'm not sure what you mean, I find smartphones' "do you want to allow this application access to X?" a pretty understandable and secure pattern.

Most users have no interest in developing the skills to handle that level of freedom responsibly. I think it should be an option, but it is unfair to say this is only corporate FUD.

agreed.

for the vast majority of consumers and employees this is like using a bazooka to kill a mosquito. Unnecessary and dangerous. But for some EXPERTS (IT/Tech professionals) and hobbyists, it’s crucial to their workflow.

Having the _option_ is a must.

Agree, but how it is enabled is important.

The same popup that asks for microphone access but now says the word root in its place, and a consumer is like “not sure what root is, maybe they meant toot!”

And then their whole machine is compromised.

Ever since I remember if you wanted root on Android, you had to go out your way by flashing SuperSU, then Magisk or KernelSU; most users don't ever use that. Even more so, with few recent solutions like KernelSU or some Magisk forks you have to go out of your way again to whitelist the app before it can even ask for root - mostly for avoiding detection, but that does act as an extra layer of security.

I'm not too worried about security for normal users if we kept it that way. I just want not to have any extra roadblocks for the powerusers from the banks, Authy or McDonald's.

The problem is that the bar needs to be moved higher and higher, to a level nowadays which would be annoying to most of us who know what they are doing.

20 years ago if I started to list ip addresses to my ISP on the phone I got somebody technical immediately. This doesn’t work anymore, because people know more about this. This caused that for example I could only turn WiFi on or off on my ISP’s router and nothing else without a specific request to them, a manual restart to my router days later, and I need to use a terrible buggy software.

These kind of things unfortunately also restrict beginners, or people who without such barriers would start to tinker, and eventually learn to do these safely. Even I waited for weeks with the call, who have been configuring routers for 25 years.

I’m installing now a self hosted OwnTracks on docker. A lot of beginner started to do the same. They make rookie mistakes all the time. Let them make those mistakes.

I would have never learned what I know without the freedom of making mistakes.

often times we’re lucky if a user reads those popups at all. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com