| > You should never run untrusted code so there is no need for a platform that facilitates it. I don't believe this is a practical philosophy given the way that ordinary people use both the web and apps today. If you can convince me that you have a plan to make everyone en-mass stop installing the Facebook App, I might be persuaded to change my mind. But I regard the advice, "don't run untrusted code" to be a bit like saying, "stick to abstinence to avoid pregnancy". The advice isn't technically wrong, we just have good evidence that it doesn't work for society in general. I also think that "untrusted" is being used as a really broad catch-all here. Trust isn't binary. I trust a calculator app to give me the correct answer to a multiplication problem, I don't trust it to store my banking information. What sandboxes do are they allow us to set up boundaries for apps that we partially trust. Of course, sandboxes don't remove the need for consumers to be taught not to blindly trust everything. But they're not designed to solve that problem, just to make it easier to manage. There is no way to remove the need to educate consumers; trust is too broad of a topic to divide every app into a single "trusted" or "untrusted" bucket. So what sandboxes do is embrace that grey area rather than ignore it. In the physical world, if I'm securing a bank or an organization, there are going to be people I distrust so much that they can't even enter the premises. There are going to be people I trust enough to walk around while supervised. There are going to be people I trust enough to be unsupervised, but not enough to give them keys to my vault or server room. And finally there will be a minuscule number of people I trust to have full access to everything. Imagine if instead, our policy was, "you shouldn't let untrustworthy people into your building in the first place, so security measures past that point are useless." Would we be able to build a database of 'trustworthy' people who could have access to the vaults of every bank they walked into? When we get rid of sandboxes, we're still using a permissions system -- all we've done is made that permissions system less granular and harder to moderate, because we've removed our ability to say nuanced things like, "I trust Facebook to connect to the Internet, but not to read my contacts." |