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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

I dunno; my son constantly asks me if it's okay to install some MineCraft mod or another (he's been asking less and less because my answer is always "No").

Likewise, chat can lead to bad interactions. "Where do you live?" and "Are you a girl?" type questions. I haven't observed this, but the possibility remains. We've has serious talks with our son about this kind of thing.

I'm not paranoid, but forewarned is forearmed.

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Why deny your kid the ability to mod?!? Dude, you're putting your kid in a box by not letting him explore the world of modding. The ability to add something new to your game is a powerful one and I think it can help a kid wrap his head around how a game is working internally. I think part of a parent's responsibilities toward their kid is to encourage the kid to explore the world (in safe ways of course) and I think minecraft mods are probably a pretty safe way especially if you're approving them one by one. You're stifling your kid's creativity every time you say no to one of his proposed ideas without just consideration. Just my opinion.

Well, after the second time I flattened and rebuilt my son's machine because it was infected with mod-carried malware, I was done.

I'd been dubious prior to letting him try them out. It's hard for kids to be safe about downloading things.

Well, that's how they learn. That's probably how you yourself learned it.

Kids need to be able to tinker with computers, and that includes both downloading malware and cleaning the machine including possibly reinstalling it from the ground up. That's how people grow their digital immune system that helps them navigate technology landscape safely.

Constantly fixing everything for our kids will lead to another generation of computer illiterates. This article covers this topic pretty well:

http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-comput...

This is just a testament to Mojang's poor mod system. They should have an API that only allows mods to perform safe, sandboxed operations and an in-game mod browsing tool to prevent things like that, especially when such a large percentage of their audience is children.

Unless they add multi-processing to the mod system, they can't. You can't "sandbox" a Java class like that. You can't deny it access to JNI. You can't deny it access to java.io. You can have the host OS do this, of course, but now we're talking something far, far more complex than any mod system ever.

Which is, frankly, an absurd demand.

Mojang should have a mod API, but that won't do diddly squat to improve saftey. Don't execute code if you don't want that code to run.

Of course you can deny it access to JNI [1]. The Java platform has had this built in since forever. This is how applets work. Aside from sandbox exploits classes in Java can be locked down so much that they can pretty much only allocate memory and burn cycles.

[1] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/SecurityM...

Java Applets? That thing that had exploits like clockwork?

Yeah, that worked great

Regardless did you even bother looking at the documentation of SecurityManager? That would be a disaster to try and support. It can't clamp down per-library, it's all about current thread. Mods run in the same thread, they have to. So now you're suggesting that every. single. call into or out of a mod is guarded manually by updates to a permission manager that you are preventing the mod from modifying via reflection through... magic? Yeah, there's no way in hell that would ever work.

We execute untrusted HTML all the time. (And javascript.)

You might argue that HTML is not a general purpose language, and that is exactly true. That's what makes it easier to sandbox.

HTML isn't code, you can't execute it.

And JavaScript runs in a VM designed specifically to handle untrusted code.

Neither applies in the slightest to the Java VM or Minecraft mods which, by definition, occupy the same process space with the same permissions as Minecraft itself. It is not a web browser, it does not have process sandboxing, it does not have a seperate VM specifically for mods, etc...

> HTML isn't code, you can't execute it.

That's exactly a point I wanted to make. See https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/login/2011-12/ope... and http://langsec.org/papers/langsec-tr.pdf

To be fair, browsers spend a lot of effort on making sure their sandbox works as intended.

When they have a defined modding API, they could expose it to a scripting language like JS or Lua that's potentially even easier to sandbox, too.

Or, y'know, any kind of API, instead of people overwriting mojang's code.

No kidding. As an API provider, Mojang is pretty terrible.

So give him a VM or image the machine. You have an ability that parents who aren't tech savvy don't.

Do it for him, then.

If that would be too much time, use the FTB launcher; the modpacks there should be about as safe as it gets.

Or, hell, use my modpack at http://madoka.brage.info/, though that's pretty much just TPPI anyway. I'm a random internet person on hacker news; you know you can trust me.

"flattened and rebuilt"

What's "flattened"? Like you stomped on it?

Grats on raising another dumb user.

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