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>The future in personal computing I think lies squarely in an automatically updated sandboxed environment

- When the future moves to sandboxed environments, (financial) risk will move there too and attacks will target that future in the sandbox, and attacks will develop with technologies allowed within that sandbox. Disallowing anything but port 80/443, appeared to be a secure environment 10yrs ago, and now javascript, cookies, and the web sites incur many more diverse types of attacks than earlier, within what was allowd.

- A managed, self updated environment, or a walled garden, already gives the authority a bigger power on every activity and that's often a bigger cut (no botnet can dream of 30% of all transactions...) and a draconian power than sporadic illegal attacks to some business. And this is a bigger risk overall, to diverse businesses, than this poor botnet poses.

I don't disagree with your conclusions about managed platforms being better for enduser security, but for what it's worth a vast majority of botnet payloads are being loaded by drive by exploits, email based infections are generally rather targeted these days because spray and pray email infections typically get caught in spam filters.

While the bulk of the drive bys come from plugins that don't exist on your classic walled garden (ios) webkit is far from invulnerable. ios (and others) are quite resistant, but so was ASLR at one point - malware rises to the occasion.

The case about walled gardesn is the same old argument but in new clothes.

Every so often, someone comes along and says that people don't know what is good for them, so its better that someone decide for them rather to let "them" decide.

Sometimes it happens in politics, and we get dictatorships. Sometimes it happen in the market, and we get illegal monopolies. Sometimes it happen with the police force, and we get a police state. Sometimes it happens in crime, and we get mafias. Sometimes it happens in families, and we get forced marriages. And sometimes it happen with software, and we get walled gardens.

Deciding for people by removing all choices are not "a better way". We just tend to forget what the cost are of losing the ability to choice for our self. Its that, or we are just saying that all software around us is just of such small importance that being allowed to decide your own fate is not an important thing.

Indeed its a matter of basic education really: most people don't know about spammers or how well organized they are but the moment they learn about their tactics they catch on quick and stop falling for link bait blogs and comment spam.

Better that than not being able to install what you want because "the garden protects us!"

cletus: I agree, but also think that lack of diversity in user environments is a big contributing factor to this problem. With 90%+ of people using only three computing platforms (Windows, Android, iOS), criminals and other sociopaths have a powerful economic incentive to develop antisocial viruses and botnets. So long as only two or three user environments remain dominant, people will be exposed to this kind of 'Irish potato famine' risk.[1]

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29#Pota...

This is a great point and you should totally start a competitor.

Are you suggesting he start work on an new computing platform because the existing market lacks diversity?

While I agree with the point that diversity begets vulnerability, I don't think starting a competitor would be the most effective idea. Monocultures usually have strong forces that keep them in existence. With bananas, it's an inability to reproduce. With invasive plants like garlic mustard, it's allelopathy. With the industr(ies) we're talking about, it's the existence of massive inter-indusrial coalitions between hardware manufacturers, software companies, infrastructure providers, and the like that instigate the lack of diversity.

If cs702 tried to take action by building a competitor, he would have about the same chance of success a sapling in a field of kudzu. Looking at the factors that cause the monoculture and finding a way to disrupt them, I think, is a more promising idea.

Sandboxing is great for the typical user.

But we should never stop demanding that we can install our own certificate roots for signed binaries to verify against, and that users are allowed to make their own decisions about allowing access outside the box (if they think they are capable).

Sandboxing only helps so much. You can run a browser extension in a sandbox that defrauds advertisers.

A fresh verified binary (including all extensions) can be loaded into the sandbox each time the user opens the browser, so the infection would be limited to the current session only.

The sand-boxing problem is not infecting people with binary's they don't want. It's a social attack where users installing bonzi buddy style addons that have both wanted and unwanted behavior. Or people just clicking yes to download that video viewer software, etc. Because, in the end all sand boxing does is buy's you a popup which people are trained to click on.

For those users, I guess we'd hope they don't install their own certificates and Microsoft/Apple/Google/Canonical can invalidate the Bonzi Buddy certificates for bad behavior.

You're right that it's a difficult problem and probably unsolvable but IMO that doesn't mean we can't reduce it to much less than it is currently.

What about a sandbox where all programs that came from the internet were locked in except for verified binaries. Then make it difficult to add new certificates, like require the user to enter a password (perhaps different from their login). Have microsoft say no program should require this, and as long they do a decent job of adding certificates themselves most users will not even bother learning how to.

Honestly, this should be requirement #1 in every system. Give the user an easy (but not easily exploitable, of course) way to unlock the system.

Totally agree, and I think part of the popularity of this whole 'web application' swing is because browsers like Chrome et al are so well sandboxed also. It makes it almost entirely risk free to automatically download and run random code (javascript), something that would be entirely unthinkable if done natively in today's environments.

"The future in personal computing I think lies squarely in an automatically updated (even managed) sandboxed environment."

Until the day where the main server serving the automated updates gets compromised and instead of serving, say, an updated Chrome, it serves a version of Chrome which a) is compromised on the behalf of a botnet master and b) never ever accepts any other update automatically.

Because people have been trained never to update their browser themselves anymore they'll think everything is fine.

Because hundreds of millions --if not billions-- of people are running Chrome suddenly you have the biggest botnet ever out there.

I find it very interesting that you fear extortion, exploits, DDoS, identity theft, invasion of privacy and whatnots as an argument for putting something in place which potentially can be way more destructive.

But of course this shall never happen right? Just as we haven't seen FaceBook getting penetrated and just as we've seen any major bank getting hacked right? And rogue employees also don't exist right?

Be careful about what you wish in the future...

Did the "centralized anything == bad" camp show up or something? This is a surprisingly hyperbolic rant about browser security.

How is this different to the status quo of hundreds of millions running old exploitable versions of $BROWSER, infected with malware which hijacks your internet connection? All you've done is swap one delivery mechanism for another.

You don't fix this by switching out automatic updates for manual ones, because users will blindly install an update even if it's a badly-designed 'update dialog' popup on a shady website. You fix it by ensuring users can trust their software, and care enough to do so.

It is really just choosing between lesser of 2 evils.

1.) A million people using $BROWSER, never updating, continually downloading free_ipad.exe

2.) A million people being owned by an intelligent hacker because of a fault of Google, that is relatively quickly patched, and I'm sure someone will figure out something to disable those rouge Chrome installs.

The first scenario is much, much more likely to happen, and while the second could happen I doubt, Google would sit on their hands while it does happen.

I guess the only problem is in the second issue, its not your fault if you got screwed. Its your mom's, and just your mom's, problem if she downloads free_ipad.exe, but if Google is hacked all the sudden all your info is comprised and it wasn't your fault.

Considering these two options however, IMO, I'd rather place my faith in Google overloads keeping us all safe.

I don't think many home users are using Outlook.

Until she got an iPad my mother ran Outlook. It’s all she knew how to operate for a mail program, and she "wasn’t learning something new".

I don’t think she was alone - I’d bet a ridiculous number of $300 netbooks have a $100 Windows OS and $200 MS Office Suite installed on top.

and my mother has been using yahoo mail forever... I still doubt most home users actually use outlook (most home users wouldn't even know how to set it up).

It's very much an enterprise / business thing for the most part.

Seriously?

Strictly speaking, you are probably right. Outlook has often been bundled with the higher tiers of the Microsoft Office suite and omitted from the lower tiers. But Outlook Express and Windows Mail? Certainly there are many home users using them. They've been bundled with Windows or IE for years.

I don't think this distinction affects the grandparent comment's point.

It doesn't matter if it's bundled or not. How would any grandparent know how to set up a mail client?

Most computer illiterate people I know have always used hotmail or yahoo mail (slowly changing to gmail) rather than setting up pop3 or imap access to a mail server....