It's up to you, really, to only use flatpaks that declare tight permissions and implement the proper protocols to safely access resources they don't declare.
This isn't always easy and a lot of software on flathub is old-ish, so people tend to open up permissions since it's difficult to implement all these features properly. In my experience people will rarely stand in your way if you try to improve a package.
It’s also just hard to make breaking changes on Linux. Apple can declare something is changing and you have 1 year to get with the program. In Linux you have to bargain and plead with devs over 10 years to change something.
Restricting an app to not have file system access is a breaking change. It would have been dead in the water if they didn’t meet half way and make file system access an optional permission.
Apple has much better backwards compatibility than Linux. The APIs haven't changed much since the Carbon->Cocoa transition 25 years ago, and SwiftUI (but that's optional). The impact of app sandboxing on developers was small - and sandboxing is universal on macOS now, there are only different levels of sandboxing but no such thing as unsandboxed apps anymore.
Apple's introduction of sandboxing to an app ecosystem designed without it was a masterclass in OS design that goes unappreciated in our industry. Nobody else pulled that off. It's no exaggeration to say that macOS is the most secure desktop OS by a long way, it's not even close. Linux trails far behind in third place. They achieved this via:
• Extremely long term planning (multi-decade timescales).
• Extremely good systems design.
• Incremental change, so developers always had a digestable chunk of work at any given point. The work needed was smeared out over decades, not drop-kicked onto people in ways that left them flailing.
• Good developer relations work to ensure devs got help quickly if they hit issues.
At no point has Apple's security team had to change course, reverse a prior decision, redesign a subsystem or fail to meet their goals. Everything has slowly clicked together so smoothly most people, even devs, didn't even notice it happening.
The sad thing is, the engineers who pulled this off are largely unknown. The head of Apple Security came from the One Laptop Per Child project and deserves a lot of credit, but much of the careful detailed design that makes the Apple security architecture work is done by unsung heroes. One guy was known only by the name "Perry the Cynic"!
Edit: I did some searches. Perry the Cynic was Peter Kiehtreiber, who seems to now be retired.
>macOS is the most secure desktop OS by a long way, it's not even close.
GrapheneOS has become a desktop OS (because of all the work Google has done to adapt Android for desktop/laptop use) and its security exceeds macOS's.
You can connect a Pixel 8, 9, 10 or 11 to a USB-C DisplayPort-alt-mode hub and have a GrapheneOS desktop that way. In a few months, you might be able run GrapheneOS on a Googlebook.
Aside from that I agree with your comment, particularly your assertion that "Linux trails far behind" macOS in security.
The fact that this is up for debate already says all. For anyone passing through, read the blog posts and his social media feeds, make up your own mind.
Actually, if we could recursively automate things on higher levels with the same tech without ever reaching diminishing returns, we'd be finishing up the colonization of our galaxy right about now. Since that didn't happen, it's safe to say they will find that point of diminishing returns where you need to do more manual work, and make you put in full effort, like what always happened.
I played with Estonia’s e-residency and they use asymmetric cryptography for everything so the ID is public but does nothing without the corresponding private key.
People had to raise hell to get that, while being made fun of by their CMs on social media. Even the opt-out is full of silicon valley dark patterns. Whoever is calling shots about the product at Mozilla doesn't have your best interests at heart.
What are those dark patterns? It's an off button, it works, and it does not get back on. It's the polar opposite of the "maybe later, I'll ask again every week and reset the setting in your back" unfortunate norm that plagues a lot of major proprietary software/service.
"You can turn it off" is not in the same category of "would you like to turn this on?" or even "do you want this in the first place?"
Opt-out is not consent, nor is it respect.
Opt-out is a dark pattern, period. Opt-out is forcing something onto users and hoping they don't go out of their way to disable it. It is the same as "maybe later".
No it isn't. All you're doing is making it harder to talk about dark patterns.
You want to know dark patterns?
How about having to physically mail a letter to cancel your news subscription or gym membership?
How about burying your "delete account" button so its only findable by third party websites who keep the correct link up to date. And they still try to convince you to deactivate instead.
How about making you pay to cancel your subscription?
How about the frequent tip begging on online orders or at a fucking fast food location? Especially when the lowest option is 20%!
A default with a clearly labeled section in the settings (that's searchable!) is NOT a dark pattern. It is not tricking you in any way. You may be annoyed by the default, and you have every right to, but by calling this a dark pattern you just make it harder to talk about all the above stuff because you trivialize them. Because at the end of the day, every binary option has to be toggled in one direction or another. Do not conflate these things
Posting this without actually looking at what these stand for is more than useless.
People need to be paid. People want benefits. People need to be taught how to edit. Children need to be taught how to research. People need to be brought together to figure out where the site and the tech is going. People want to feel safe participating in their community. If Wikipedia had only ever been "server costs" it would be nowhere close to what it is today.
GoDaddy is the worst registrar, consider it a liability in any of your setups and switch immediately. I've had similar experiences, save yourself the trouble.
Just Stop Oil announced the cessation of all activities in my country.
Officially it's because reportedly they've achieved their goals locally, but I can't help but think that it was really because the POTUS Just Stopped way more Oil than they ever imagined they could.
He is in the process of killing the rise of neonazism, exposing those religious extremists that want constant wars on the Middle East, creating a multipolar world commerce chamber, turning the EU into a federation, popularizing socialism (and even outright communism) in the US, dismantling the US's foreign government overthrowing apparatus, creating actual diplomatic relations between the Eastern Asia governments...
He's also making the case for radical downsizing of the US military, since he's shown the military's take that it won't obey illegal orders was a sham.
A substitution of coal for oil, or more likely natural gas, isn't that big a shift of emissions in the short run if it's a stopgap for massive solar and wind investments. Solar and wind install quick.
I mean.. we do all the time no? Hitler tried to make Germany great and made it shit. Mao tried to make China great and killed tens of millions. Stalin, Pol Pot.. the list goes on.
If we attribute accidental evil, why should we not attribute accidental good?
Fascism is fundamentally driven by a realized nihilism where pure destruction is the actual goal, rather than an accident. From the very beginning, the Nazi party explicitly promised the German people wedding bells and death, including their own deaths and the death of the Germans. The population reportedly cheered for this not because they misunderstood the message, but because they actively desired to wager their own destruction against the death of others.
According to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler operated in a world "in which even success makes no sense,"[0] meaning the movement prioritized an "intense line of pure destruction and abolition"[1] over any constructive political goals.
This intentional drive toward self-destruction culminated at the end of World War II. In his 1945 Telegram 71, Hitler declared, "if the war is lost, may the nation perish". Instead of trying to protect his country in defeat, Hitler actively joined forces with his enemies to complete the destruction of his own people by ordering the obliteration of Germany's remaining civil reserves, water, and fuel. The devastation of Germany was therefore not an accidental failure to achieve greatness, but the logical, intended conclusion of the "suicidal state" fulfilling its death drive.
0. Joachim Fest, Hitler and The Face of the Third Reich
1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
That sounds very tin foil hat to me. Yea, people who are angry don't act super rationally, and when losing Hitler acted like a toddler having a tantrum. That doesn't mean the failure and suicide was the point.
If Hitler was trying to find a gold mine under Germany and instead found a bomb there that killed a bunch of people, we wouldn't blame him for murder, it was an honest mistake.
Murdering millions of people wasn't exactly "accidental evil", it was very deliberate. Which parts of what these guys did do you think were accidental?
Mao's campaign to kill sparrows was a result of a belief that they were a net loss for harvests.
Stalin's support of Lysenko was a result of thinking Lysenko was actually able to drive agricultural growth.
Both mistakes led to mass deaths.
We still tend to attribute those deaths to those leaders, because their brutally authoritarian rule was what allowed those mistakes to go unchallenged and get fixed before they caused that level of harm.
Both of them also killed a lot of people maliciously and intentionally, but a large proportion of their death toll as a side-effect of their oppression, not the goal of it.
> We still tend to attribute those deaths to those leaders, because their brutally authoritarian rule was what allowed those mistakes to go unchallenged and get fixed before they caused that level of harm.
What is the analogue here for attributing the rise of alternative energy sources to Trump? Being too incompetent to avoid harm isn't the same as being too incompetent to avoid benefit, because your job is to create benefit.
It's Trump's job to create positive outcomes. If he creates positive outcomes by accident while trying to create negative ones, he should get panned for trying to create negative outcomes.
We were clearly talking about the context of energy sources, where he's trying to push something he calls "clean coal". What's the positive outcome there?
> Trump's stated goal of regime change in Iran would (likely) have been a positive outcome if it has actually happened
The number of Americans still believing this is baffling and saya everything about their history education.
"The previous 20 times we forced regime change ended up a net negative for the people in those countries, but surely this time it would've been different!".
> previous 20 times we forced regime change ended up a net negative
Plenty of counter-examples, too. WWII. South Korea. Potentially Venezuela, mostly because we constrained our objectives.
I also don’t think it’s fair to constrain OP’s statement to “the people in those countries.” Regional impacts matter, too. An Iran that isn’t funding terrorist proxies everywhere could still be a net positive even if the average Iranian is no better off afterwards. (To be clear, I’m in no way supporting this stupid war.)
> Plenty of counter-examples, too. WWII. South Korea.
To even hint at those being in the same category of "regime change attempt" as Iran (2x), Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Congo is really desperate. Come on now. Not comparable and irrelevant.
> the same category of "regime change attempt" as Iran (2x), Chile, Iraq
…why are Japan and Germany not comparable to Iraq? We’re talking methods and outcomes, not motivations. All involved a wholesale invasion, occupation and supervised restructuring followed by disarmament.
> Murdering millions of people wasn't exactly "accidental evil", it was very deliberate. Which parts of what these guys did do you think were accidental?
His belief that the jews were the problem was the issue. But Germany has still not recovered scientifically or technologically. He was just as wrong about jews as Mao was about sparrows, or Stalin about wheat.
I don't see the distinction you're trying to make. Millions died in all three cases.
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