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by Cthulhu_ 300 days ago
It's a tradeoff. You may have the knowledge and risk awareness to install anything, circumvent protections like you still can on MacOS, but the vast majority does not and should not have that power; this led to huge botnets during the Windows XP era when many internet connections were first set up. They overcompensated with Vista, asking permissions for everything so people developed a kneejerk "just hit accept". The iPhone came out not long after, with a safety by default - which invariably meant restricting what a user can and cannot do and install on their system.

I think it's been a net positive overall. The percentage of people that want to do and install more with it is small.
2 comments
ndriscoll 300 days ago
The problem with Windows XP was that at the time you plugged it into your modem directly (or the computer contained the modem if it was dialup) with no firewall, and it would get exploited in seconds without any user interaction through some default Microsoft background service. Wifi routers were probably a much larger impact than any operating system changes. Especially anything user facing. It's also why clickbait silliness aside, running windows XP isn't actually that likely to run into issues today.
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zb3 300 days ago
> It's a tradeoff. You may have the knowledge and risk awareness [...] but the vast majority does not and should not have that power

But that power is not more dangerous than having guns, right? So.. while I can apply for a gun license, I can't apply for an unrestricted computing license, so something is wrong here, don't you think? Unless you believe guns are less dangerous.

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matheusmoreira 300 days ago
> But that power is not more dangerous than having guns, right?

It actually is.

Free computers are intolerably subversive. They can literally wipe out entire sectors of the economy just by copying artificially scarce things. They can defeat police, judges, militaries, governments by democratizing access to strong cryprography.

They want to control our computers at all costs. We must resist. Computers are too important for us to allow them to be controlled and limited.

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kjkjadksj 300 days ago
I can shoot an executive and it would tank the stock far more than anything I could do with a computer.
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