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Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by NovemberWhiskey on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @12:05PM (#34711055)
I see where you are coming from here; but aren't the stakes a bit different here?

A games console is for games. Although there are probably some tiny fraction of people who have installed other apps on there, the overwhelmingly vast majority of people are just going to use it for games.

A smartphone is likely to have address books, email, your photos, maybe sync with your e-health devices, banking applications ... from my point of view, it's an entirely different risk profile.

Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by izacus on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @12:27PM (#34711443)
A smartphone does nothing what a desktop computer (with ubiquitous root access) doesn't and apocalypse still hasn't happened.

Your literal argument was used for game consoles as well (Oh egads, what will happen if we allow freedom to infest our DRM protected systems?!) until Valve proved everyone wrong.

Maybe instead of spewing the same corporate profiteering arguments here, perhaps think on how we could design our software for freedom AND security and whether defending megacorp monopolies is worth the small improvement in security you're getting in return?

Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by NovemberWhiskey on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @12:37PM (#34711613)
>apocalypse still hasn't happened.

The anti-virus and anti-malware are each multi-billion dollar industries; end-point protection is a top-five information security concern for any enterprise; new and exciting ransomware incidents fill the news every week; millions of PCs contribute to botnets that deliver DDoS attacks for pay...

It might not be the apocalypse but it's pretty goddamn terrible.

Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by izacus on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @12:54PM (#34711910)
> It might not be the apocalypse but it's pretty goddamn terrible.

In what way and why are you (well, actually a corporation with monetary interest) making a decision to lockout users because of those industries?

(Also multi-billion? Strongly doubt that.)

Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by mysterydip on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @01:18PM (#34712289)
> (Also multi-billion? Strongly doubt that.)

McAfee was taken private in 2021 for $14B https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/8/22769910/mcafee-private-i... And had quarterly revenue of $500M at the time: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/mcafee-corp.-mcfe-surpasses-...

For one endpoint security example, unless I misunderstood.

Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by bastardoperator on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @03:11PM (#34714192)
What if I told you that I myself along with the vast majority of consumers just simply do not care about underlying access.
Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by RHSeeger on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @04:00PM (#34715053)
>(Also multi-billion? Strongly doubt that.)

Judging by a fair number of articles, you would be mistaken

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220104005794/en/Glo...

> The global antivirus software market is expected to grow from $3.80 billion in 2020 to $3.92 billion in 2021

Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by soiler on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @11:18PM (#34719699)
> In what way and why are you (well, actually a corporation with monetary interest) making a decision to lockout users because of those industries?

Did you forget that the conversation was about phones being locked down to protect against these kinds of malware?

Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by flohofwoe on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @12:11PM (#34711156)
There must be a way by now to stash this critical stuff away safely in one half of the phone, while the other half runs all the untrusted stuff. If there would be a will (by Apple) there would be a way.
Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by NovemberWhiskey on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @12:17PM (#34711260)
Sure, you stick things into sandboxes and only allow specific permissions to access outside the sandbox. In which case, users habituate to allowing any permissions that anything they install requests (c.f. Android).

So then maybe you say "no permissions are allowed for sideloaded applications", but then you're back here with people complaining that the platform owner is crippling the independent ecosystem because it doesn't allow access to the camera or the mic or the address book or whatever.

Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by OkayPhysicist on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @03:58PM (#34715029)
Or, you take the more extreme step, and obfuscate from the application whether or not permissions have been granted. The reason why people default to granting excess permissions is that many applications simply will refuse to run without them. If instead of "overtly deny permission" there existed the option to "covertly deny permission (by opting to feed plausible random data instead)" and making that the easier to select "deny" then you have the best of both worlds: well-behaved applications start asking for fewer unnecessary permissions, because the data they're gathering is being poisoned, poorly-behaved applications have their harm reduced, and users who want to build programs that actually need high-level permissions can do so.
Re:Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming M... by flohofwoe on Thursday February 09, 2023 @03:08AM (#34721044)
It's not much of a sandbox if permissions exist to escape the sandbox. All "secure" apps (mail, pay, banking, chat, ...) need to live in a special compartment which they cannot escape, and no installed apps are allowed in this compartment, only builtin apps.

Everything else lives in a more relaxed compartment which cannot access the "secure" compartment at all.

Essentially two devices, one completely locked up, the other completely open.