That's dysfunctional enough to qualify as "obsolete" in my book.

Your impression is pretty far off, I think. Just naming a program setup.exe makes it escalate by default. Many installers can be used without escalation but going the traditional path isn't suspicious.

How do you configure things without something basically equivalent to writing to /etc?

And whatever you do use to configure things, what if photoshop accessed it directly? I'm sure you'd be upset with that even if it didn't touch /etc.

If something is system wide i want a commit based workflow (with minor exceptions like dhcp / ip)

Everything else should be in its own folder without the ability to change anything outside of that folder.

Phone-style isolation is more like giving each app a separate user account. With that level of isolation and robust permissions, apps can do very little "on your behalf".

How do you do anything on a computer that’s not via an app of some description? Do you make arbitrary exceptions for the likes of zsh and chmod? How does the OS know that chmod was knowingly run by the user, and not by some “sudo wget” exploit?

> How do you do anything on a computer that’s not via an app of some description? Do you make arbitrary exceptions for the likes of zsh and chmod? How does the OS know that chmod was knowingly run by the user, and not by some “sudo wget” exploit?

I'm not sure what the purpose of the question is, because a unixy command line doesn't use phone-style permissions. I didn't say everything works this way.

If I installed photoshop with phone-style permissions, it wouldn't be able to invoke chmod and wouldn't even be able to access my downloads folder.

(Trying to tighten down a command line shell ends up being a tangent, but the short answer is that zsh itself would need to be trusted and hardened, and wget would not be allowed to run chmod. When it comes to downloading a script and then running that script on purpose, you probably just have to accept that doing so bypasses the permission system. Thankfully I very rarely need to do something like that.)

So you installed a text editor and wanted to edit /etc/hosts. Should the OS permit you to save your changes or not?

Now what should happen if the text editor decides to modify /etc/hosts without your knowledge?

You can put pressure on app developers to use standard installation methods that don't give unrestricted access.

Even if users don't read the permission dialogs, you can make one path a lot easier. And you can flag anything too tricky as malware behavior.

OSes are doing a bad job of this, but they could do much better. Linux is making the most progress on various package formats.

> Speak for yourself. For installing via system packages, yes. Otherwise absolutely no.

That's an overly strong rebuttal given they said "most" and weren't talking about a specific style of install.

I really doubt the implementation difficulty is the actual reason. It's not hard to have an extra table of specific article permissions.

Tea being available is relevant! Your list of fallacies is less useful than the comment you replied to, despite its flaws.

Also using emotive language isn't a fallacy, get out of here with that. Using the phrase "authoritarian nightmare" does not replace logic with emotion like an actual fallacy would.

If we're using the Facebook example to call this unacceptable, we should really be fighting a lot harder against Facebook itself. Because it still has a reasonably positive reputation overall and it's affecting billions of people.

> If we're using the Facebook example to call this unacceptable, we should really be fighting a lot harder against Facebook itself.

I don't think many here would disagree with you.

> Because it still has a reasonably positive reputation overall and it's affecting billions of people.

I'm gonna disagree with you. Maybe it's because I live in the Bay Area so the culture is affected by the proximity of tech companies. But my family in the middle of the country mostly seem to be on the same page, so I don't know how you explain that. It may be that I'm drawn to people who care about these topics and some degree of sameness is expected within family dynamics resulting from the parents' values raising us. Whatever.

I think a good portion of society considers FB a garbage product but don't know of an alternative and just accept it for what it is. I think a smaller portion of society recognizes that they are amoral and terrible for society. How many countries have now discussed legislation to limit kids accessing social media (whether you agree or disagree)? That didn't spring out of nowhere fully formed. Years of criticism got us there.

> Maybe it's because I live in the Bay Area so the culture is affected by the proximity of tech companies. But my family in the middle of the country mostly seem to be on the same page, so I don't know how you explain that.

I can explain that. 100% of Americans add up to roughly 5% of the worlds population. As such, there are billions of non American users with very different viewpoints and opinions.

Yes, we really should be! You’ve hit it on the nose with that point: Facebook has been a stalker with effectively legal immunity in a lot of people’s lives for quite a long time. I’m glad to see others realizing it, too. The more that do, the sooner their formerly-untouchable behavior becomes unacceptable.

Indeed, it should burn in hell, and most of its companion platforms and its competitors should join it.

Did you misread the post?

They're doing this because the localhost shenanigans got blocked. This is pure internet requests, but the IP changes (or fails to resolve) based on what's in your hosts file.