At this point, what am I supposed to do other than uninstall Windows completely? No real sandboxing, a mountain of legacy…
Windows is just a mountain of shit.
Why does every Linux distro under the sun try so hard to protect the garbage under /usr/bin/ and /etc/ when literally the only files that matter to me are in /home, which is a free-for-all?
Oh, what do you mean there's also SELinux, Snap, Flatpack, Docker, Podman, ...?
Because a compromised user could infect shared executables and spread the infection. A bit harder to do with etc but for sure possible. The main target would be infecting bash and you are done from the get go.
>when literally the only files that matter to me are in /home, which is a free-for-all?
The home folder's read write is usually restricted to the user. The only scenario where this isn't the case to my knowledge is Ubuntu where others can read it, but this is just a huge flaw in Ubuntu that almost no other distro has.
> The home folder's read write is usually restricted to the user.
Yeah, and that is the point. All user's programs including curl, wget, the web browser, anything else that connects to the network run as the user, and all the user's programs, by default, have access to everything inside ${HOME}.
Most people don't really care if /bin gets obliterated, but they do care dearly when /home/joe/photos/annies-2nd-birthday gets wiped.
You can always have two user accounts: oblio and unsafe-oblio anf have a shared folder between the two for transferring files. Or invest into some backup software.
And no, it's not "a lot of work" it's the bare minimum
We have supposedly all the smartest minds in the world working in tech and they haven't been able to create a simple, cheap, reliable cross platform solution for user data protection, backup and restore.
It's easier to blame users instead.
I even signed it and everything.
I always thought Americans were "nanny state this, nanny state that". Doesn't this also apply to huge state sized corporations mandating a cut of every app sold and forcing everyone to only install apps from them?
Yes, because the users are in fact the problem. The options are either to trust the user to make decisions (and technically illiterate users will screw things up for themselves), or lock down the system so that the user isn't allowed to do anything the corporate overlord doesn't let them. There is no middle ground.
Provide more education and guidance for users and more corporate controls.
If they would have really started to do this in 2005, we would have been there by now. Instead we get more UI toolkits and more UI refreshes and AI everywhere.
As for the desktop community… Well, it has a severe lack of professionals.
telnetd CVE-2026-24061. It's embarrassingly simple exploit but took years to be discovered.
> When telnetd invokes /usr/bin/login, it passes the USER value directly. If an attacker sets USER=-f root and connects using telnet -a or --login, the login process interprets -f root as a flag to bypass authentication, granting immediate root shell access.
Uninstall Windows completely 4 years ago when Windows 11 was released heralding in a new era of absolutely insane, self-destructive, unnecessary and unwanted shit?
There is no valid excuse for this vulnerability. It's existence is a category error that's only possible because Microsoft has completely jumped the shark. Continuing to use /any/ of their products is a choice to accept pure insanity as a default.
You have:
- Windows Sandbox (consumer-level sandbox) - Creating a separate User (User folders are permission locked to their user by default, system binaries cannot be modified without admin access) - HyperV (VM hypervisor) - Edge Browsers
Don't get me wrong MSFT quality is dropping steeply, but this is still a strong point. For comparision, on Ubuntu, user folder by default can be read by all users.
Common practice, and even encouraged by Windows itself, is having the administrator account be the only account. This misuse is a very common thread in Windows systems, and security breaches alike.
Many Linux distros are also guilty of this, disabling the root account by default and having the only user have sudo privileges, just like Windows.
This hasn't been true since Vista. Kind of even before that with XP, it really showcased using multiple accounts to home users with a much more stylized user selection screen.
https://github.com/microsoft/edit
Yeah, it's a re-creation of edit, but it's pretty great... also runs outside windows.