<story><title>Can&apos;t you just right click?</title><url>https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/unsigned.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>white-flame</author><text>The fact that the standard model of computing is that applications are opaque machine code blobs that can access everything in your user permission space is the core problem in privacy and malware.  Applications should see nothing but their executable jail, and whatever was intentionally allowed to them by the user (eg, Open file dialog giving the application an opaque file handle, etc, not carte blanche access to the entire filesystem).  Ideally, the notion of machine code blobs should be done away with as well.&lt;p&gt;Mobile OSes got to rethink everything in an era of constant adversarial connectivity and started off on a better foot in this regard.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>badsectoracula</author><text>This works for some type of software, but not all type of software. For example a file server or a file manager wont work. A VCS client wont work. A game engine that needs to keep track of imported resources (especially when you want automatic imports when the file is saved via a 3rd party tool - e.g. saving a model on Blender or a texture on Krita causes an automatic reimport&amp;#x2F;convert to the engine&amp;#x27;s format). Basically any sort of content management software that doesn&amp;#x27;t provide everything itself but relies on 3rd party tools already installed on the user&amp;#x27;s machine wont work.&lt;p&gt;Software like clipboard managers also wont work. Screen sharing and remote desktop software similarly wont work. Screencast software wont work. Hotkeys software wont work. Most desktop automation software wont work.&lt;p&gt;I could go on and start looking at what i have installed to extend this list (i&amp;#x27;m sure most of the software i have on my PC wont work), but i guess you get the idea. Almost everything that doesn&amp;#x27;t fit in the media consumption model that you&amp;#x27;ll often find on a phone or a tablet wont work (and amusingly enough, at least on my Android, stuff like a file server does work, though i&amp;#x27;ve heard Google wants to remove that functionality).</text></comment>
<story><title>Can&apos;t you just right click?</title><url>https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/unsigned.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>white-flame</author><text>The fact that the standard model of computing is that applications are opaque machine code blobs that can access everything in your user permission space is the core problem in privacy and malware.  Applications should see nothing but their executable jail, and whatever was intentionally allowed to them by the user (eg, Open file dialog giving the application an opaque file handle, etc, not carte blanche access to the entire filesystem).  Ideally, the notion of machine code blobs should be done away with as well.&lt;p&gt;Mobile OSes got to rethink everything in an era of constant adversarial connectivity and started off on a better foot in this regard.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saagarjha</author><text>macOS ships with a quite strong and granular capability-based security model with its sandboxing mechanism (at least, when it works and is applied correctly). The feature is there, advanced applications already make use of it, but it is difficult to get arbitrary applications to adopt it (its inner workings are declared SPI after all) and it is not really exposed to the user at all except via App Sandbox, which is fairly limiting.</text></comment>