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Re:Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-s... by JohnBooty on Thursday August 29, 2019 @02:12PM (#20832117)
I don't know how workable this is in reality. Most software needs some kind of interoperability to be useful.

- Network access

- Direct hardware access (such as games accessing the GPU)

- Sharing data to other software

- Consuming data from other software

- etc.

As we've seen, we wind up needing to turn a bunch of these on for most software, and while it's certainly better than giving them carte blanche over the entire system, a handful of these permissions are enough to work some skullduggery.

Re:Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-s... by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Thursday August 29, 2019 @03:15PM (#20832658)
> - Network access

Most software does not "need" network access, it just ends up being used for telemetry, serving ads, and checking for updates you probably don't need anyway.

> Direct hardware access (such as games accessing the GPU)

"Direct", meaning they need a context handle and some shared memory to get composited by the OS. Still, I'm honestly not sure why this isn't a solved problem today. Why are GPUs not virtualizable the way CPUs are?

> - Sharing data to other software > - Consuming data from other software

Software can be grouped together and allowed to talk among eachother within a certain context without giving any given piece of it the ability to burn the world down.

You'll have a hard time convincing me that taking control away from users is a better solution.

Re:Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-s... by JohnBooty on Thursday August 29, 2019 @07:55PM (#20834794)
I would think that manually granting (or revoking) specific permissions on a per-software basis equals more control, not less!

I agree that users need full control. I also think a few decades of personal computing have shown us that the defaults should be pretty safe and therefore restrictive.

Users should have to jump through a hoop or two (perhaps as simple as `sudo enable-expert-mode` in a terminal, or some such) before being able to shoot themselves in the foot.

Re:Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-s... by chachachoney on Thursday August 29, 2019 @08:12PM (#20834870)
I think that one of the reason's we're behind on this is that major players aren't putting R&D into usable clusters of user managed permissions and tools for both power users and average users to manage and introspect them is precisely because they've found a way to both shirk the responsibility and exploit their users with an App Store.

As a result, all users are imperiled.