Comment by scoutt
6 years ago
Instead of giving my privacy away, I prefer software like anything that you have installed from a CD-ROM back in the 90's and didn't needed a weekly update. Games, 3D-Studio, Autocad (to name a few) were more complex than a web-browser (a today's web-browser) and didn't needed a weekly update or the hunger for user-requested features, let alone dialing home because. The world worked relatively fine without the up-to-date wankery we see today.
I remember them.
They were also buggy and could crash their resident OSs all the way to a stuck state, and if they did, the solution was "Try not to trigger that bug again."
Software quality has significantly improved in the era of easy patch access and auto-patching.
Holy Jesus. Those things were chock full of security holes. If you used a web browser that arrived on a CD ROM you'd be advertising massive pwnability.
In fact, you could easily simulate this by using last year's Firefox.
Firefox, chrome, linux ... all are full of unnecessary complexity. The point being - we need daily patches to keep it from falling apart.
I have links (or lynx) on an old SuSE, maybe even a Mandriva CD. Would they be massively pwnable?
Hard to say, but not necessarily a great example; exploits on software are a function both of attack surface / complexity and installed userbase (i.e. nobody bothers to see if lynx is pwnable because a zero-day against that browser will be worth, what, twenty bucks to gain access to the five people who use it?).
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