For a programmer?
I bet 99.9% people won't consider opening a .docx or .pdf 'unsafe.' Actually, an average white-collar workers will find .md much more suspicious because they don't know what it is while they work with .docx files every day.
The instruction may be in a .txt file, which is usually deemed safe and inert by construction.
*.dmg files on macOS are even worse! For years I thought they'd "damage" my system...
Well, would you argue that the office apps you installed from them didn't cause you damage, physically or emotionally?
I think the truly average white collar worker more or less blindly clicks anything and everything if they think it will make their work/life easier...
I wish you were wrong.
Never understood why that became so common place ...
It's all whether or not you trust the entity supplying the installer, be it your package manager or a third party.
At least with shell scripts, you have the opportunity to read it first if you want to.
Of course, many installers ask for administrator access anyway...
As you said, most installers need to place binaries in privileged locations anyway.
Maybe the good side-effect of LLM's will be to standardize better hygiene and put a nail in the coffin of using full-fat kitchen sink OS images for everything.
It's been over a decade since this became a norm...
And 10 years since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17636032
The link sadly seems to be dead though
why is pdf unsafe?
What format is safe then?
You’re only going to ever get a read only version.
It requires a proper PDF viewer.
Subsequent modifications would of course invalidate any digital signature you’ve applied, but that only matters if the recipient cares about your digital signature remaining valid.
Put another way, there’s no such thing as a true read-only PDF if the software necessary to circumvent the other PDF security restrictions is available on the recipient’s computer and if preserving the validity of your digital signature is not considered important.
But sure, it’s very possible to distribute a PDF that’s a lot more annoying to modify than your private source format. No disagreement there.
Yes, most consumer software does respect what you say. But it’s easy for a minimally motivated consumer to obtain and use software which doesn’t.
However, the context we were discussing was neither a consumer nor a forensic security researcher, but a recruiter trying to do shady things with a resume. I don't expect them to be a specialist, but I do expect them to be able either to get the kind of software I just described with a security stripping feature, or else to have access to third-party software specifically targeting the recruiter market that will do the shady things - including to digitally signed PDFs like yours - without them having to know how it works.
1: I wish they didn't, because my Github is way more interesting than my professional experience.
Medicine, vaccines, the printing press, domesticating crops, moving water around...
You can even add a nice "copy to clipboard button" that copies something entirely different than what is shown, but it's unnecessary, and people who are more careful won't click that.
I don't really follow the analogy here to be honest.
But you also want AI to be more secure. To make it more secure, you'll have to prevent the user from doing things _they already do_.
Which is impossible. The current LLM AI/Agent race is a non-deterministic GIGO and will never be secure because it's fundamentally about mimicing humans who are absolutely not secure.
The analogy is probably implying there is considerable overlap between the smartest average AI user and the dumbest computer-science-related professional. In this case, when it comes to, "what is this suspicious file?".
Which I agree.