Comment by mjr00
7 hours ago
> Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before. There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.
Yep. I was amazed when I was talking to a friend who's a bit younger (late 20s) and told him about a fangame you could just download from a website (Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers, for the record) and he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet.
I suspect most adults these days are like this; their computing experience is limited to the web browser and large official corporate-run software repositories e.g. app stores and Steam. Which ironically means they would do just fine on Linux, but there's also no incentive for them to switch off Windows/MacOS.
To them, Microsoft and Apple having control of their files and automatically backing up their home directory to Azure/iCloud is a feature, not a problem.
> and he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet
Ironically, being concerned and skeptical about running random executables from the internet is a good idea in general.
> Ironically, being concerned and skeptical about running random executables from the internet is a good idea in general.
I agree you shouldn't run random executables, but the key word is "random". In this case, Ring Racers is a relatively established and somewhat well-known game, plus it's open-source.
It doesn't guarantee it's not harmful of course, but ultimately for someone with the mindset of "I should never run any programs that aren't preapproved by a big corporation", they may as well just stick to Windows/MacOS or mobile devices where this is built into the ecosystem.
> plus it's open-source
Open-source only matters if you have the time/skill/willingness to download said source (and any dependencies') and compile it.
Otherwise you're still running a random binary and there's no telling whether the source is malicious or whether the binary was even built with the published source.
5 replies →
How do they know they’ve found the legitimate Ring Racers download and not some scammer who managed to get their search result above the real one?
Nothing wrong with downloading and running programs you trust, but there needs to be a good answer to that question.
To be fair, downloading and running random executables from the internet is a genuinely terrible security model when the OS (like Windows, Linux, or (to a lesser extent) MacOS) does nothing to prevent it from doing anything you can do.