Comment by ceejayoz
3 days ago
There's a saying about how hard it can be to design bear-resistant containers:
> There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.
The same is true for computers. Solutions that "allow competent individuals" to do something are also typically solutions scammers can convince Grandma to perform without understanding what they do.
(Case in point: I saw a fake captcha that told you to open Terminal and paste a command to "prove" you're human; https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1rq4bh6/warning_suspic...)
Scammers will manage to manipulate people into giving away all of their savings just fine no matter what restrictions are put in place. The excuse is just another "think of the children" to maintain control and profit.
People will murder people, too.
We don't have to make it trivially easy.
So your solution is to ban the sale of any kind of knife. Sucks that people can't really cook at home anymore, but do we have to make it trivially easy for murderers?
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Exactly, computers should only be allowed to do what expert gatekeepers deem safe. There is no possible way to allow competent users to bypass this. Even if they had to go submit a blood sample and sign a document in front of a judge, grandma would just do it anyway! Lock it all down and make sure that compilers require a government license.
The flip side of this is:
Pro: I can use a convoluted process to install an astronomy app Apple didn't like.
Con: Billions of dollars of life savings siphoned off with devastating consequences.
I'm by no means a maximalist on either side of this, but technologists aren't the only ones who get a say here.
Correct. As a side benefit we can restrict users from installing applications that go against other societal interests, like apps that allow unrestricted communications. The framework is complete for mobile devices, we just need to tackle PCs now.
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