Re:Trae: An AI-powered IDE by ByteDance
by throwaind29k on Thursday January 23, 2025 @10:46AM
(#42805074)
You don't trust the OS do that kind of safeguarding?
Re:Trae: An AI-powered IDE by ByteDance
by ryandrake on Thursday January 23, 2025 @11:31AM
(#42805447)
Desktop OS's typically don't protect one application's data from another, or the system's data from an application. At least not out of the box without configuring some kind of sandboxing solution.
The user-based permissions model is an outdated dinosaur from a time when we could trust the applications we run on our systems to act on our behalf. Applications now act on the developer's behalf, often against the user. An application "running as me" should not have access to every resource (file or peripheral) on the device that I have access to. That's a huge blast radius.
Operating Systems really need to start treating developers as adversarial from a security/permissions point of view.
Macs have started prompting for confirmation when software requests access to some directories. It’s better than nothing, but the OS doesn’t really have any kind of tutorial explaining how the permissions work and which directories are covered.
Re:Trae: An AI-powered IDE by ByteDance
by Coryodaniel on Thursday January 23, 2025 @03:50PM
(#42807917)
Trust em or not … had that happen to someone else using Cursor a few weeks back. I ran a prompt for refactoring a function and all of a sudden it started dumping someone else’s directory structure and file contents into my text file. Like hundreds of files. Not exactly sure what happened but I immediately uninstalled Cursor.
I don't think the fear is that they'll steal code you'll end putting publicly on GitHub, but everything else. I guess there is some fear that it won't just analyze and process what you currently have open, but might scrape your computer for more data and so on.
I personally don't believe ByteDance would be stupid enough to even attempt exfiltrating files from developers machines, which typically are better protected than the average user computer, just trying to see the perspective of others with a more charitable reading :)