Also, it stinks that Apple has nailed iOS that shut that even as a knowledgeable user you are not able to bypass it. They did not yet dare to do the same on Mac OS, but who knows when that comes.

And by the way, I never managed to make it work in Windows...

True, if you installed iTunes or QT and it installed it as extra, yeah, you probably have an older browser installed (but I think there's not that many people that still use it)

chrome has a way of installing itself.

The "nailing shut" is an increasing problem for anyone that believes in a free market in software. Which isn't helped by all these sites shipping value-negative software.

It is user-hostile of Apple to force use of C:\

It's caused me to believe that all these people trashing on iTunes have broken computers, because the software plainly doesn't do half the crap it's accused of doing.

I can almost understand this on the newer versions since they've made it a sort of one-stop-shop for playing media, managing iOS devices, shopping for media and software, and sorting your content databases.

But the older versions I used back when I had a "classic" iPod were just terrible and all I did with that was load music onto the iPod. I seem to remember installing some custom firmware on the iPod specifically so I could just treat it like an external drive and manage the media on it via Winamp or Mediamonkey or some other program that had no business doing a better job at handling an iPod than something straight from Apple.

Even now I just use it maybe once or twice a year to back up and update my old iPad 2. I haven't found a way to disable all of the various iTunes helper processes that want to run in the background (short of turning them off in services.msc) so it only gets updated and run when absolutely necessary.

Maybe I'm just doing something wrong and it will run better if I open it more often and let it do its thing but there's just a point where it doesn't do anything (other than iOS backups) that I can't do more easily with other software.

...but I also admit that like many things, my previous bad experiences may be causing confirmation bias and leading me to take note of iTunes issues more than I would with other software.

It's nice that I don't have to buy into their cloud or OS to use their phone.

I agree with that feeling wrong but consider it from the perspective of anyone who cares about security. We live in a world where millions of people have fallen for attacks which required them to type in their admin password and okay a software install, open the web console and paste JavaScript in to compromise their own account (see e.g. https://www.facebook.com/help/246962205475854), install custom Android apps which then exfiltrate data or attempt local exploits, etc.

Apple chose not to allow that for iOS to ban that class of attacks outright. I've reconsidered my previous cynical conclusion that this was just to boost the app store profits based on the number of people I've heard mention using an iPad because they don't have to worry about installing programs; now I think the real profit comes from the trust in the platform – you need an awful lot of $.30 app profits to balance out a single device purchase.

I'm not enthusiastic about heading into the no-user-serviceable-parts world but it's not like the traditional PC model has worked out well when the majority of non-technical users has some level of dread/acceptance that they'll make a mistake and be compromised.

Microsoft Office for Mac OSX was coded with the same evil spirit.

This behavior is unethical but pervasive, and should be outlawed somehow, it hurts everyone. Specially when it comes from the two biggest players in the market.

Disclosure: I work for Microsoft, though this experience was at a previous employer.

Microsoft Outlook for Mac (the newer "blue" one, v15.3) is actually my favorite mail client on the mac. It's basically exactly what I wanted -- I wish there was a Windows version of the Mac Outlook :)

Sometimes Words starts typing multiple lines and Excel freezes when copy pasting filtered cells. I've learned to work around these bugs, (having been there for over a year). Maybe Office for Mac is not be coded by the devil, but lacks features and is unsatisfactory in ways that make me consider turning on the PC

I'm sure they get no support from corporate IT, their company's marketing constantly makes fun of their chosen field of expertise, and they probably even have their own table in the cafeteria. :(

(number of changeable UIDs that touched our server) - (app store sales) = copies we should have been paid for

..then there's a huge problem with their methodology. It would fail on the basic use case of one user with one app store account installing the app on more than one device (especially with kid friendly games like this), or re installs after a device wipe, or reinstalls after a user with a busted phone gets a new one, and so on.

As usual, bad statistics being used in defense of the piracy bogeyman. The number of people who jailbreak their phones is a tiny minority of iOS users, and the number of people who do so to pirate is an even tinier minority of that.

Even as someone that has no moral issues with downloading apps for free, I can tell you that it's not worth it on iOS. The contrast between the "it just works"-ness of the app store, and the hoops you need to jump through to get free apps is jarring.

http://recode.net/2015/01/06/mobile-game-piracy-isnt-all-bad...

Five percent are paid downloads, so the ratio is 9.5 to 1, but a portion of those are people who have both a phone and a tablet, people who have more than one Android device with them. So a small portion of that 95 percent is going to be taken up by those installs.

More! I have burned through four Android phones and three tablets with one google account. Everyone who upgrades their device makes "one pirated copy" by the logic of this study.

And a huge portion of the current (licensed, not the chinese ones without a valid Google license) Android phones are likely to be upgrades for older or broken devices.

They believe they already paid for the phone; they know they still need to pay their carrier for something they use but paying for software?

    common that's digital. copyable. 
    wait! I need to tie my credit card to my phone? no way. I certainly can afford apps, but it's better to use them for free.
    why do they need to pay if facebook, gmail, whatapp... are free.. 
    do you read the news? app developers earn billions!
    I know you need to pay for window, but I've using for free for the last 10 years you know..

Some people here need to take a reality check break once in a while and look at people who don't make as much as they do.

Lest you think I'm speaking from a position of not understanding poverty: my salary in 2013 was $21k pre-tax, with a wife and a kid. I had a $10 flip phone and spent about $8 a month on minutes.

And honestly, I'd choose a working-order 1st gen iphone over any brickphone.

Looks like you need the reality check I was talking about. I can find you $40 smartphones in countries that aren't the one you're in. And by the way, $40 can still be a huge investment for such people (just like $500 is to a lot of people in the US).

Edit: Those downvotes-without-explanation are really unnecessary, seriously. If you think I'm wrong, you very well may need a reality check yourself.

Please stop being rude.

EDIT: saying things like "If you think I'm wrong, you very well may need a reality check yourself" makes it seem like you're not open to dialogue. It comes off as rude, arrogant, and accusatory. That probably contributes to the downvotes.

> "I can find you $40 smartphones"

I can find plenty of $40 smartphones at Wal-Mart and Kroger. But this thread isn't about $40 smartphones, it's about iPhones -- and, in particular, the parent to your prior comment mentioned knowing people "too cheap" to pay for apps despite owning (implied: relatively new) flagship phones.

I know some people who are legitimately too broke to pay for apps, but they don't have new iPhones. Last year I didn't have a $40 smartphone, and definitely not a $500+ iPhone, precisely because it would have been a bigger investment than I could justify for a phone. I get that there are people for whom a $40 phone and $1 per app is too much money, but they don't have an iPhone6 or even an iPhone5, and they're not pirating the sort of apps that only run on those phones. The people pirating those apps aren't too poor, they're too cheap.

Complaining about downvotes without replies makes it seem like I'm not open to dialogue? I think it makes some people in here seem like they live in a bubble, to each their own huh?

> But this thread isn't about $40 smartphones

Actually, it is; GGP said he "knows people too cheap to pay $1 for apps" and that is completely valid for Android as well. The rest of your post's premise is wrong on that basis. I'm not claiming iphones are popular amongst that sector of the population. But even if I did, as someone else said below, actual pirated/resold iphones do cost around 30-40 USD making them just as accessible.

Edit: And I don't mean to be rude, it just disgusts me how some people here are so full of money it doesn't even register that for some, $1 is a big deal.

No. Treating disagreement as a sign that people need a "reality check" and that they're "in a bubble" makes it seem like you're not open to dialogue. Like you don't even acknowledge the possibility that someone disagreeing with you could have a valid perspective.

> "it is ... completely valid for Android"

Yes, but the broader context of the thread was about iPhone piracy. Also note that he claimed he knew people "too cheap" to pay $1 -- not people "too poor" to pay $1 -- for apps.

I get that $1 is a big deal to some people. I live in one of the poorest zip codes in my state. I've taken in three poor families in the last two years (a divorced mom, teen parents, and a single woman working through community college). My church runs a fairly substantial food bank and clothing bank. I'm connected to a ministry that rescues young women from polygamy (FLDS, AUB, and related groups) and they often have 3-5 children, no money, and a 6th grade education at age 20. I taught in a school where 95% of students qualified for federal free/reduced lunch. Some of my family members do charity work out at Navajo Mountain in southern Utah, which is one of the poorest places in the US.

The people I know in deep poverty are not major app pirates. Most of them don't have smartphones, and the ones that do have $40 or less grocery store phones running Android 2.2 on a pay-as-you-go plan, with either free games or no games.

Conversely, everyone I know who pirates $1 apps is either a college student whose parents pay for everything and they just can't be bothered to ask mom for iTunes credits, or they're a middle-class adult who thinks "I can get it for free if I jailbreak my phone, so it's not stealing." They have adequate dollars to pay for apps to go with their $500+ phone and $100+/month plan, but choose not to. Hence, "too cheap".

Microsoft seemed to do the exact opposite in this time period. Their Office software was very Mac-like and worked very well on OS X.

I've had a Mac Mini for 3 years, and I still haven't found any Apple-made desktop software I would call "decent". I've had only iPhones since the 3G came out, too, so I'm not just an anti-fanboy.

I fail to see the difference between OSX and Windows then. Legacy Win32 APIs probably are still there, somewhere, but they've built a fairly solid system on top of that. PowerShell is one major argument in favour of Windows platform: it really makes resource management and scripting (and remote administration) quite nice. Meanwhile, for practically anything other than core system services (and sometimes for those too...) you need to install 3rd party applications.

It's exactly the same on Mac OS: I had to install Spectacle just to make the system support the most obvious shortcuts for positioning and resizing windows. Homebrew/mac ports are nice and I know of no Windows equivalent, but I think they target very specific kind of users and are rather limited in usefulness.

In any case: I'm a Linux user, have been using FreeBSD on the desktop before that for years, worked on Windows earlier, and now I'm being forced to use a Mac for iOS development. I see no real difference between OSX and Windows7/8 in terms of OS capabilities: out of the box they're both rather weak (for my purposes, anyway). With some tinkering and 3rd party applications both can be made into workable systems - but the tinkering is both harder and more limited than what's possible on Linux.

Other than mentioned homebrew and some degree of POSIX-compliance which makes compiling many *nix programs natively under Mac OS possible, what makes it nowadays better than Windows (I mean core OS functionality)?

First, I'm probably not alone on HN in reading that last sentence of yours that begins "Other than..." as being roughly equivalent to "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show?" OS X doesn't just have "some degree of POSIX-compliance"; it's Unix, full stop. If you are that "specific kind of user," this isn't optional.

Second, as squishy as this sounds, I simply like the OS X user experience more than Windows or any Linux/FreeBSD desktop environment that I've tried. The Mac gets the GUI right in subtle ways that are hard to describe but that I always notice when I'm using other systems. And this isn't due to lack of personal exposure; I'm, well, old by today's computing standards, and I've used the original MacOS for years, FreeBSD for several years (including professionally) and many versions of Linux, from the SLS days up through Ubuntu 12. (Actually, I'm running Ubuntu 14.10 and Arch Linux on two different servers, but they're GUI-free.) And I wouldn't trade OS X for any of them.

I know for some people, being able to tile terminal windows into a 3x3 grid without ever touching a mouse is their UX nirvana, but I am not one of those people, and I don't think I'm less productive for it. The fastest way to get a window the size and place I want it is often with a mouse. The fastest way to copy and move files is often with drag and drop. I know (some) people insist that I must be slowed down by constantly using mouse-driven software and switching between a tabbed terminal, a GUI text editor and a visual diff tool -- all with (gasp) overlapping windows! -- but I'm not. Really. And there are a fair number of Mac-only programs that I prefer to their Linux or Windows counterparts, if I can even find such counterparts. (Keynote, OmniOutliner, Soulver, ReadKit and xScope all come to mind.)

And, last but not least, it's nice -- at least for me -- to have a full Unix system that also has a lot of commercial software support. I don't run much Microsoft or Adobe software, but I'm glad I have the option. The applications I mentioned in parentheses there are all commercial, and as cliché as it may be to claim that commercial software generally has a better UX than free software -- and even more obnoxious, that Mac software tends to have a better UX than Windows -- it often matches my experience.

I have a main machine I run Linux on, and use a KVM to switch between them.

I admit that using a Windows keyboard on it is definitely a barrier, though.

The sort of software you see profiled in this article is the result of those kinds of quick-buck hustlers trying to game the software market. That's the majority of global business culture, which is why outside walled gardens with quality control it's the majority of software.

Ultimately I think this is the case because human beings are wired for scarcity and conflict. Get while the getting's good, because the next famine or raiding army is always coming. No point in building any real value in that world. It'll just get stolen or destroyed. HN is full of people who subscribe to the futurist/enlightenment notion of progress and the idea that we might be almost post-scarcity enough to entertain the decadent luxury of benevolence.

Whose fault exactly is it?

Has anybody in HN worked with a company which does this crapware bundling, let alone creating? Or does anybody know anyone who's "in the business"? Because I, quite honestly, can't understand how or why people would be doing this. Is it really that "Well, I know this shit is going to infect thousands of machines with software which nobody would like to have, but hey, it gives me my salary, fuck yeah!"?

It's just sad that there are people scamming others like this, and people who jump into it because hey, paycheck!

If anyone here has worked for Adobe (Flash included crapware for a long time), Oracle (Java updates used to or still do include crapware), Google (browser toolbar was crapware), or Apple (Quicktime for Windows attempted to install iTunes and Safari), then yes.

Adobe software: download a tiny disk image, launch the hideous Adobe installer program, give it root, have it download and install God-knows-what to God-knows-where. To uninstall, open a terminal and go medieval on everything with a name containing "Adobe", "Macromedia", "Flash", etc.

Adobe creates the most user-hostile software that is not pure malware.

I have always had a problem with adobe, and I used to say it was because 'they specialize in non-standards', but I think you have a much better point. It just feels like you're getting screwed every time you see that A.

I think you have the nub of it here. I first learned to loathe Adobe almost 20 years ago, with Acrobat for X11. Every other X11 program would spawn a new process and a new window when you typed "program ... &" in your xterm, but "acroread ... &" would talk to the One True Acroread Ur-process instead. This, of course, caused all sorts of unpleasant and non-standard behavior when opening and closing PDF files. Not to mention that the interface was a bloated nightmare compared to xdvi and ghostview.

Then they bought Macromedia and Flash, with its ability to create non-standard horrors on the web. It was like watching the formation of a black hole of abusive software, and I still wait for AOL and RealPlayer to be sucked in by Adobe's evil gravitational pull.

you got GoogleUpdate as ..

  - startup trigger
  - firefox addon (!!)
  - scheduled task

Stallman was ALWAYS right.

The truth is, if you look far enough, you can always find something to be guilty about. I'm not going to blame programmers working for any of those companies, but I will squarely place the blame on companies with hypocritical culture.

Apple upper management: Hey, let's bundle all this crap with something that people actually want!

Years later

Apple upper management: Wow! People are bundling crap with things that people actually want! We should put a stop to that by fucking over our customers' right to choose in a free market!

To answer your first question, someone from HN should surely about this given: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20130115/y-combinator-is-fu...

Extensive commentary at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059806

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5062133

EDIT: pg's response was basically "suck it": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711

If 'we' wanted to, we would at least work on getting rid of this kind of behaviour. In an alternative world, the equivalent of GreenPeace would parade the C|NET offices, newspapers would write angry editorials about them, harmed users would write them millions of complaint letters, and class action lawsuits would be filed.

Problem is that 'normal' users have been slowly subdued into "it's my fault" mode.

People who think that software should be free, as in beer.

Developers have to be paid. When people paid for software with dollars, this exchange was much more straightforward. But now people think that software should be free as in beer, which means it comes with ad software or "sponsored software" that in turns sells ads, or spies on everything you do, or something to pay the bills.

Some developers choose to sell their software, and they have their perfect right to do so. Hard work needs to be compensated, and if someone wants that compensation to be money, then so be it. Just label it in clear terms. Ad-software is not a legitimate earning method, it's robbery. What it tells is that you don't give a damn about neither problem you're pretending to try to solve (otherwise you wouldn't let your app to be polluted with worthless crap) nor your users, who will have to live with malware (which, on global scale, is a huge negative utility in terms of lost productivity and health lost to stress/anger).

(I skipped here over the big, expensive software - things like Photoshop, Matlab, etc. That they are result of hard work of people who need to get paid is obvious, and everybody knows that they should buy that software if they needed, and they will receive something valuable in exchange.)

I'd go a bit farther: not all software can be sold. Making some extremely niche software fills that niche, but there may be a very small audience for, say, combinatory logic interpreters, or theorem provers. If we as a society demand that every piece of software be sold, and maybe the bulk of the members of the society have a weird idea that the price of something has to reflect the cost of that good plus profit, then a lot of software will never get written, and a lot of ideas won't get tried out, and a lot of niches will go unfilled.

Of course TemMPOraL is right: There's nothing wrong with someone who truly wants to give away software for free. Saying that's wrong is saying that any act of generosity, kindness or charity is wrong.

But Daniel is not saying that free software is the problem, but that "People who think that software should be free" is the problem. When people expect software and web services to be free, producers who can't afford to give it away free are forced[1] to resort to other means. And when he says that for people paying "for software with dollars, this exchange was much more straightforward", he is echoing Maciej Cegłowski[2] of pinboard in his call: Don't Be a Free User[3].

The real problem is not free software, but software that dishonestly claims to be free. Ad supported software is not free[4]. Software that is monetized by pushing other software is not free. Software that sells your data is not free. Software that hooks people first and then pushes in-app purchases[5] is not free.

I'm actively working on how to get us out of this mess. If you're interested give me a holler.

-

[1] I'm being generous. I think anyone who is ethical and honest with themselves wouldn't allow themselves to be forced into doing anything dishonest. "You can't get permission for the wrong thing and don't need it for the right thing" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8877192)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords

[3] https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237

[5] I call this the drug dealer business model. Microsoft perfected this in they way they got everyone hooked on DOS, then Windows and then Office, and then took it to a new level by giving away IE for "free".

If it's going to spy on you, it should tell you right up, not in small prints in the EULA.

Also, the assumption that developpers have to be paid is wrong, some people might do it for charity or for other non-profit reasons.

There are plenty of services I pay for that sell data about me and/or show me advertizements.

So this is an appealing story, but it only works until someone decides "I could get paid, AND sell the user to advertizes/data harvesters." It's always easy to make now-impossible scenarios into appealing hypotheticals, and I'm sure that market forces COULD mean that none of the software or services currently supported through advertizement and data harvesting invasive and advertizement wouldn't do so, but nobody can say for sure.

Hey look:  -> "App store... (3 new)"

Pretty sure I bought this laptop. ($2000) But there sits an advertisement, right in my GUI. Yes, this one is pretty harmless, but it is still there.

(1) Convincing anyone in management that developing such a thing would be worthwhile when people are still buying the old thing in droves and when such an endeavor would have a long bootstrap/incubation period before it'd be commercially viable.

(2) Making all the legacy software work via compatibility layers.

Not sure which of these would be harder.

Present OSes have security models rooted in the multi-user needs of workstations and servers in the 1970s and 80s, back when the Internet was kind of a walled garden and security risks consisted mostly of students and kids playing around.

Okay, what security model do you propose then? I'm curious because I don't see a security problem here. No OS security was bypassed, there was no OS bug that was exploited. This is what happened - The user downloaded a file and installed an application.

In your previous post you mentioned terrible permission separation and application isolation - I don't see how its connected to the problem.

It seems like you want it to be so that malware applications can be installed by any user without the system suffering any consequences. You can't achieve that goal without also crippling regular applications that legitimately might want to do everything that a malware application does.

First and foremost, security should be a primary OS design objective and it should go into the design deep. It should be something you think about before secondary concerns like a process model, binary format, driver framework, or memory management.

Every single executing piece of code should be signed (with self-signing by the user an option of course). In that respect the app store model has it right, but I'd like to see something that ultimately puts the keys in the hands of the user. That means that a keyring is something you put down with the task manager, memory manager, etc. It's a core OS function. The ability to administrate the keyring and control permissions is also a core OS function.

Every function call outside a context should do a permission check against the certificate of the executing code. The right way to design this would be to make it work first, then figure out how to make it fast without compromising security. I think fundamental innovation would be needed here. I'm not sure exactly how this should work.

We should get away from distributing compiled code that runs straight on bare metal for most things. It might still be available as a permission, but one that would come with a warning to the effect that this could allow something to pwn your machine. Honestly I'm not sure if it's necessary. I'd look into the idea of shipping binaries as LLVM byte code and AOT compiling everything, and possibly including a secure implementation of OpenCL for really high performance computing needs.

A concept of users should be baked in from the get-go too, and should be part of the permission set of an executing context. Each user should have a key and be able to authorize other keys by signing them, etc.

So yeah, I think that's sort of a starting point. Crypto and permissions should be baked in from the get-go.

It'd also be important to think about usability from the get-go, since if it doesn't "just work" nobody will use it. UI/UX would be a challenging part of the project.

Storage is another challenge -- how to allow execution contexts to hand-off and/or share data without compromising security and without being too inefficient. The fact that storage is getting so cheap means things like copy-on-write with versioning might be baked in from the get-go to permit almost any operation to be rewound for a good period of time. So if a piece of bad code borks your work, just undo. I wonder if the whole OS could be built around a command model where things just fall off the end when they're too old? Log-structured everything? Again, not fully baked but I think it's the right general direction.

I highly doubt I am unique in thinking these things. I'm not the sharpest tack in the world and these kinds of ideas strike me as obvious results of reasoning from first principles about current OS challenges and failures.

The app store and mobile sandboxing models are steps in the right general direction but they are very, very ham-fisted compared to what I'm imagining here. They're the right ideas applied as a band-aid to fundamentally obsolete systems. They also cut the user out of the picture. I think that's because their models are ultimately too shallow and coarse-grained (and also because the vendors want control). Develop something good enough and the user can be put in the driver's seat without the machine turning into a malware cesspit. If the user authorizes a piece of bad code, just de-authorize it and it dies.

--

I don't understand how only allowing signed execution would help avoid this problem. Like you said, anyone could pay to get their company listed as a 'trusted' entity. The problem is you cant push this task to the user, because the non-technical layman user is not in a position to determine this.

If we only allow signed binaries to be loaded in memory, then we won't need IPC to pay the security tax for every function call. - given that there are probably going to be tens of thousands of them per second.

>We should get away from distributing compiled code that runs straight on bare metal for most things. [..] Honestly I'm not sure if it's necessary.

Poof, no more program debuggers, profilers, no more device drivers, no more third party file systems, no more .. you get the idea. Maybe that's not "most" things, but ask yourself how functional is an OS without the ability to load kernel mode stuff.

> Each user should have a key and be able to authorize other keys by signing them, etc.

How does that help my mom? She's just going to call me when the computer asks her "weird questions about keys and permissions". The entire point is that the average user is not the best judge of what is and isn't malware. Technically savvy users already have no issue with malware for the most part.

>Develop something good enough and the user can be put in the driver's seat without it turning into a malware safari.

Again, why would the user WANT to be in the drivers seat? They have no clue how to drive the car!

> If the user authorizes a piece of bad code, just de-authorize it and it dies.

That only tackles the problem of cleanup, which is a separate problem. By that time, the malware is already on the system and it's sent your credit card and documents to the bad guys.

The purpose of signing isn't to guarantee that an entity is anything, but to allow the user to absolutely and decisively rule what code is allowed to execute. If the Russian Mob sneaks some code from "G0ogle, Ink." onto my machine by tricking me into authorizing that cert, I can just de-authorize it and then it all DIAF.

When I say signing, I don't necessarily mean the app store feudal model. I mean an inverted version of that -- where the user decides what runs by approving certs by signing them with some kind of master key.

"Poof, no more program debuggers, profilers, no more device drivers, no more third party file systems, no more"

You can debug Java pretty effectively. There are great toolchains for that. I agree that direct ASM may be required for a few things like drivers, but those are going to be the exceptions not the rule.

"How does that help my mom? She's just going to call me when the computer asks her "weird questions about keys and permissions"."

"Again, why would the user WANT to be in the drivers seat? They have no clue how to drive the car!"

Freedom and control are things you should have, but should not be forced to exercise. It should be possible to leave them alone and just trust one or more vendors. This is a UI/UX issue.

With things like iOS I don't have the option.

"That only tackles the problem of cleanup, which is a separate problem. By that time, the malware is already on the system and it's sent your credit card and documents to the bad guys."

Absolute security perfection isn't possible, but I think huge improvements can be made. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Data leakage and social engineering are particularly thorny because they're really only half technical problems. The meat sack using the machine is always going to be a weak point in any security model. But if the machine were secure, it would help.

The entire problem is that the users have no idea prior to installing the software, whether its legit or malware. I don't see anything in what you've proposed that solves the root problem. Yes, we can look at peripheral problems like cleanup and revoking certificates but those only affect users AFTER they've already made the choice of installing a particular piece of software.

Just you, my friend. If you recall, here is the point you were challenging:

> this is a band-aid over the fact that OSes have terrible permission separation and application isolation. If OSes were better architected from a security point of view, it would be substantially less of a problem.

Would you now concede this point?

Yes, and I didn't receive any information that would lead me to believe that applying his/her suggestions would substantially tackle the root problem. All process isolation does is push the problem out further into the application side of things. Now the user has to micromanage the data flow in between applications. The root problem has very little to do with OS architecture, and I'm happy to be convinced otherwise.

>Would you now concede this point?

Okay. If you insist. I have no desire to "win" the argument. It's merely idle chit chat for me. My code's compiling ;)

I should be able to give a Russian mob hacker on crack access to my machine without worrying too much about them doing anything I don't give them permission to do.

a) I'd like all applications to be run in sandboxes. That way you don't have to care if you application has malware or its processes got hacked. You have that in iOS I believe (but iOS has other problems), but to various degrees it's been done in solaris and freebsd, probably can be hacked in linux but no major distro has it as a precooked solution.

b) Have OS written in memory safe language. Microsoft got Singularity, I have no idea why that never saw the light of day. That thing could kill Linux on a large portion of the server market. Hopefully we will get something written in Rust now.

As of 1 Jan this is now economically infeasible in the EU (see "VATMOSS").

*edit: Wish it were a surprise.

Apple has a gatekeeper model because many years ago it shifted to the view that money users spent on third party software was coming out of their bottom line.

Its mostly a windows problem. I haven't seen malware from .debian.org or more recently .freebsd.org.

So on freebsd, pkg install nvidia-driver, or on legacy linux apt-get install nvidia-driver and you're all done.

Someone looking for trouble could do it the hard and dangerous way, but why?

Also commercial software other than possibly games, is dead man walking and is dead on FOSS platforms. Sure, go ahead, pretend its the 80s and try to charge me money for an editor, or a compiler, or pretend its the 90s and try to charge me for a web browser or a database, its just not happening.

OK, make an editor that great as Sublime Text, put a msgbox that I really should pay $60 for multi-PC license, and be done with it.

</troll>

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do

    Ubuntu uses the information about searches
    to show the user ads to buy various things
    from Amazon. Amazon commits many wrongs
    (see http://stallman.org/amazon.html); by
    promoting Amazon, Canonical contributes to
    them. However, the ads are not the core of
    the problem. The main issue is the spying.
    Canonical says it does not tell Amazon who
    searched for what. However, it is just as 
    bad for Canonical to collect your personal 
    information as it would have been for Amazon 
    to collect it.

https://fixubuntu.com/

I mean maybe—it's not like you have the option to analyze or debug what you're running. You can't predict everything that can go wrong, even if you know the rest of your system top to bottom.

Have you seen the Debian repositories or the Ubuntu Software center. They have a great selection of software, are easy to use, while at the same time not taking away your freedom or resorting to Orwellian tyranny.

The Debian repositories are great, but don't kid yourself: unless you're a developer, it's very likely that there are at least a handful of mission-critical apps missing from the Linux ecosystem.

IMOE the main issue are software-suites

Cad and 3D: my dad is really used to windows, and learning the linux environment was an easy step for him. He could never do the switch to open source cad alternatives. We tried using wine, but for performance we ended up keeping windows as a 2nd bootable for him to draw.

Photoshop, and Corel: I installed ubuntu to a friend who works as graphical designer. She is currently using gimp, and inkscape but she had a hard time making the switch.

Games: my son really was the most resilient to the change. He played every blizzard game, and since there aren't (wasn't ?) linux support it was a big non-stop for him. Then he moved to minecraft, and that made him reconsider the switch. He's been using linux for about 2 years already -- no windows partition at all

Atleast Macs allow you to not use the AppStore (for now).