[bryanrasmussen]

>They may hurt themselves in the process and sue us!

has a hacker ever hurt themselves by hacking and sued the company whose computer they were using?

Anyway I guess people can also buy their own computers if they want to play outside the sandbox.

[_54qb]

Fair enough. But that was not my rationale, it was just a made-up corporate rationale that is not too far from what I can observe in reality. Take, for example, lobbyists in right-to-repair hearings. They use arguments like this: "If we let users repair their smartphones, they might hurt themselves, so it must not be allowed and instead always performed by a skilled technician". The implication always being, that if users hurt themselves, they will sue.

> Anyway I guess people can also buy their own computers if they want to play outside the sandbox.

My point was, precisely, that we might get to some point where this is no longer possible. Imagine they stopped selling what we today call "PC", and instead everything is closer to smartphones or tablets. There would be no way to setup a development environment on the machine. There's no sudo access, no compiler toolchain...

[vladvasiliu]

A hacker? Probably not. A random Joe who copy/pasted some random things found on some sketchy website? I wouldn't be surprised.

Also, what matters isn't whether someone actually sued as much as if some executive somewhere thinks that someone might.