Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by skrebbel 3478 days ago
Are you sure? Afaik you can convert most apps to UWP apps but they don't have the same rights and capabilities as the oldschool desktop apps. I don't exactly know what the limits are but I doubt stuff like Wireshark or f.lux could run as an UWP app.
1 comments

You can now publish win32 binaries to the Windows Store, which run in a virtualized environment. They get the same rights as normal win32 exes because they _are_ exes.
I'm still confused. Why are they run in a virtualized environment then? Can a Windows Store win32 app change system display gamma settings? Monitor all network traffic?
From what I've seen, most of the virtualization that remains is filesystem/registry virtualization, primarily with the goal to insure clean install/uninstall. Security is handled in most of the usual Win32 manners (user token privileges, UAC, et al).

From your examples, I believe gamma settings would be accessible, but every tool I've seen that reliably monitors all network traffic uses a kernel-level driver and I don't think you can install kernel-level drivers from the Store right now.

Awesome. This makes me wrong and my entire rant flawed. Thanks!