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It's called "the world wide web" and it works on the principle that a webpage served by computer A can contain links that point to other pages served by computer B.

Whether that principle should have been sustained in the special case of "B = localhost" is a valid question. I think the consensus from the past 40 years has been "yes", probably based on the amount of unknown failure possibilities if the default was reversed to "no".

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owasp A01 addresses this: Violation of the principle of least privilege, commonly known as deny by default, where access should only be granted for particular capabilities, roles, or users, but is available to anyone.

Indeed, deny by default policy results in unknown failure possibilities, it's inherent to safety.

>Violation of the principle of least privilege

I completely agree with this, programs are too open most of the time.

But, this also brings up a conundrum...

Programs that are wide open and insecure typically are very forgiving of user misconfigurations and misunderstandings, so they are the ones that end up widely adopted. Whereas a secure by default application takes much more knowledge to use in most cases, even though they protect the end user better, see less distribution unless forced by some other mechanism such as compliance.

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