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by adrian_b 529 days ago
While most computers are personal computers, which have a single real human user, you still have to run a lot of untrusted programs, like the Internet browsers or whatever programs you might download from dubious sources.

While perhaps the term "user" is no longer the best, there is a need even more than before to run programs with limited rights, corresponding to the rights of some pseudo-users, which should not be able to access or modify anything belonging to the real human user, unless a special permission is granted.

2 comments

Android works like this. It's linux based and runs every app as its own user. On top of that it adds SELinux and many other isolation strategies.

https://source.android.com/docs/security/app-sandbox

So, basically all my sandbox concerns go away if I run as root and every browser runs as its own user