[josephg]

Its certainly a start.

People like to hate on the permission dialog boxes on MacOS - but each app only needs to ask you once for permission. I don't think I've seen one of these dialog boxes for months. And they add a remarkably large amount of security to the overall system given how little they inconvenience users in the steady state of system execution.

But they're a very coarse brush. Once an application has permission to access some folder, it can do anything it wants there. And only certain folders and permissions are protected. (I think any app can read / write any data in ~/Library).

I think the desktop security environment would work extremely differently if it were designed today. I'd love to see more people experimenting with ideas.