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by taeric 499 days ago
Totally fair. I just don't know of that many (any?) "desktop calculator" applications that people download. I'm far more expecting that people are downloading and running social applications than they are isolated things.

Mostly fair that it would be good if we could say "on site foo.com, request for any access to not-foo.whatever that happens." I can't remember the last time I saw the sheer number of third party network accesses that happens on far too many sites. It was sobering.
2 comments
bhelkey 499 days ago
> Totally fair. I just don't know of that many (any?) "desktop calculator" applications that people download.

Quite a few apps fall into this category: single player games, photo editors, word editors, video players, pdf editors ...

It seems very reasonable to restrict these applications from accessing the internet.

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taeric 498 days ago
Gaming, I'm willing to largely get behind as something that should be more locked down. Networked games, of course, are a thing. Single player games should be a lot more isolated, though.

Any sort of editing software, though, gets tough. That is precisely the are that I have had bad experiences in in the past. Would try to edit raw photos and export them to a place I could draw or publish with them. Using a shadow banned application is the only way I know on how to describe how that felt.

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frederikb 499 days ago
Oh, but they do! There used to exist a boatload of malware on Android disguised as common conscience apps, famously flashlight apps/widgets.

As a random example, see this one ( https://www.welivesecurity.com/2017/04/19/turn-light-give-pa... ) which is a banking trojan cosplaying as a flashlight widget.

Now there is a more or less sophisticated permission system which users then bypass by still accepting any prompt if you promise them anything shiny...

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taeric 498 days ago
Apologies, I had dropped offline.

I actually am less against these ideas on the phone. Quite the contrary, I think I'm largely agreed that more efforts need to be done to let people control those.

I am also sadly skeptical that this works, there. I've seen my family that is all too eager to just click "ok" on whatever an app says it needs. :(

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