The question was 'is someone who spends money for code signing more trustworthy than someone who doesn't' and it was being treated as if the trust or at least, increase in comfort, somehow comes merely from the act of spending money. It's an opt-in to a service that mitigates the impact of malicious code.

The parent statement was that having signed apps made them easy to disable. If all apps had to be signed, everything would have a reputation hook, and also be easily disabled. It's the hang-up of using the for profit 'verified' code signing ecosystem that makes signing ineffective.

Of course, MSFT/Apple etc will abuse it to kill apps they/govt don't like.

I don't really understand how any of this makes signing ineffective.

If the only way to play is to go through entrenched gatekeepers, who watches the watchers, hmmm? If anything this should be seen as a power grab by entrenched interests to have a cryptographic lever to pull to shut people out of what should be a user's discretion decision pre-emptively. Walled gardening at it's finest.

Code signing is a bit like gun control. It really doesn't solve the problem at all. It just pushes it up a level, and makes things more difficult for legitimate users.

It also lines up incentives such that the preferred model of software distribution shifts in the grand scheme of things toward for profit code.

While code signing is a neat technical solution, it's still a technical solution parading about as a solution to a social problem. And the social problem it is a solution to (that of untrustworthy folks existing) is not in any way mitigated by the act of signing as mentioned previously.

I don't really understand how any of this makes signing ineffective.

Apps submitted to the Microsoft Store are signed by Microsoft (only), iirc.

Although it costs $19 or $99 to sign up, one time.

That is partly because only those apps can run on Windows S (also available in 1703: https://www.howtogeek.com/302352/how-to-allow-only-apps-from...)

They could enable this for win32 apps but they want to push things towards the walled garden.