>Although, OS X is a bit like Windows. A bad program running in userspace can essentially ruin your system as much as a program running as root.

Erm, OS X has sandboxing. So, no. Except if you use unsigned third party stuff.

I think he only sandboxed apps are the ones from the App Store—Signing is orthogonal to sandboxing. Even signed apps that you get from anywhere other than then App Store aren't sandboxed.

You can sandbox non-App Store apps the same way as App Store ones, you're just not forced to. And so developers don't.

Which is pretty much everyone reading HN.

In which case it's no different to Linux, OpenBSD or whatever.

As long as its your account files that matter, and you're running an app un-sandboxed, then it has access to them.

Nothing Windows or OS X particular about it.

As about "ruining your system", no, without root privileges it cannot, in either OS X or Windows. Of course it can if there's a privilege escalation bug, but there are tons of those for GNU/Gnome/KDE packages too.

    ...like Windows. A bad program running in userspace can essentially
    ruin your system as much as a program running as root.

How so?

Are you talking about pre-Vista - i.e. versions of Windows in which the user created during first run was an Administrator, and UAC didn't exist - though you could certainly create non-administrator accounts? Vista came out eight years ago...

Or do you mean pre-NT, when there was no separation of any kind? NT came out 22 years ago...

I mean that most of the "important stuff" is running in user space. You can shut down the computer, spread viruses, and delete the user's most important files. The only administrator-owned files on a typical Windows installation happen to be the replaceable ones. The ones modifiable by a user are the custom, personal, and sometimes irreplaceable files.

This is mostly true on personal Linux machines as well. I'm just expressing my opinion that you don't need root access to pwn someone's machine.