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by AnthonyMouse
1917 days ago
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The original sin of the web is that the code comes from the server again every time you run it. That means you need robust sandboxing and anti-fingerprinting etc., because you're running potentially hostile code that nobody has been able to audit. Other types of programs don't have that problem. If you get some code from Github, you can review it yourself before the first time you run it. Then every time after that, it's still the same code so you only have to do it once. And you can have someone you trust do it for you, like a Debian package maintainer. But with nobody reviewing the code, the machine has to do it, i.e. there have to be a bunch of technical constraints on tracking and malicious behavior. It's a terrible rubbish fire that we don't have any kind of real application platform for real applications that runs the same on every system and doesn't have a monopolist dictating terms. We should fix that. But we could fix that, and be better off than by giving up and conceding the world to surveillance dystopia. |
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Well, they didn't. They do now, as you're expected to update everything continuously. A typical user of a PC or a smartphone has something downloading an update pretty much every day. Even a tech-savvy user can't hope to keep up with trying to track down all sneaky automatic updates and read a changelog before applying them (assuming there even is one, beyond "This update improves experience and fixes bugs" zero-information boilerplate).
At this point I'd be willing to pay for a service that would intercept all automatic updates on my devices and warn me about the ones that bring in telemetry, malware, performance degradation or other misfeatures. Unfortunately, such a service would require impossible feats of crowdsourcing to keep up with the deluge, and itself would be a huge privacy/security risk.