Comment by BadBadJellyBean
3 days ago
Why is it reasonable that installing software is behind an "advanced flow" what ever that means? I find it not very reasonable at all that the only way to install software on my phone is by jumping through hoops. I don't think it reasonable that the Play Store is the only portal. I don't even find it reasonable to call installing software "sideloading". Downloading and installing software from a vendor's page has been the norm for decades before smart phones came along but all of a sudden when it is on a small screen the user can not be trusted? That's ridiculous and not at all reasonable.
It's not the screen size, it's the demographic shift. By 2000, only half of U.S. households had a shared living room PC, mostly for work and/or games. Everybody having a phone in their pocket later was a change that we did very much have to account for. Non-technical people can be scammed very easily into life-ruining mistakes with a little social engineering and a little bit of access to powerful tools already on their devices.
I remember when big sites started having to put big banners in your browser console warning you that if you weren't a dev and someone told you to paste something there, you had been scammed, and not to do it. They had to do that because the average Facebook user could be tricked very easily by promises of free FarmVille items or the opportunity to hack someone else's account, and those are fairly low stakes bait. Now people bank with real money on their phones.
> Now people bank with real money on their phones.
Maybe the real solution here is not to. Pay cash when you can (better privacy), else use a credit card. Other types of "banking" such as sending wires is best done on a big screen anyway. The idea that everything can and should be done on a phone is terribly misguided.
And yet the Play Store and App Store are the largest vectors of scams and malware out there, to the tune of billions of dollars a year.
We should be prioritizing securing our systems so that they run only what we want them to run, instead of putting all of that trust in gatekeepers who make money when they let you get scammed.
They are the largest vector of scams and malware because they've centralized it and it's hard to deliver malware and scams otherwise. That malevolence will always happen and centralizing it ensures a single avenue that can be controlled and measured and importantly sued when they fuck up. I can't sue f-droid when they allow malware on my device, that's one of many reasons why I don't use it, that's why nobody uses it in real life. Every day on HN I see people who seem to unironically think "enshittification" is a real term normal people use, a generally understood term by people who don't follow links to Corey Feldman's blog.
HN tends to forget that linux is not a target for general malware because nobody gives a single fuck about linux as a real malware target because they're smart, and therefore not the target of most scams. HN has the cute attitude that technology is king and that as long as you inspect it and open source it and care enough and have full control, then that's enough. Often the same people ignoring that AI has made it way easier to fuck stupid people over with no effort at all.
I don't not want unlimited control over the hardware that I buy from vendors like Google but I don't know yet of any better way to keep stupid people from kneecapping themselves other than introducing harder and harder quizzes. If you think it's an advantage that third party vendors like f-droid are absolved of responsibility then you deserve and own the fault when you get hacked and fucked over. Most people don't want that. They have real life to deal with. In real life you can kill people or sue them and it's harder to kill people over the internet.
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