What it definitely does is prevent you from verifying vote results and specific votes. While people selling votes will (in our day) just make a photo and send it to their buyer.

If by “other things” you mean violence against those voting “wrong” - yes, that’s a problem. When you invent a way to have a verified anonymous vote, let me know.

My comment is a specific application, and your comment is “no u wrong”.

To allow easier falsifications.

The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users.

Why would you even want anonymous votes but not anonymous comments?

The former is as good\bad as the latter.

I know they were already technically public. I think they should be shown.

Send them anthrax spores, then they will fail

Initially great for bottom lines. Then consumer dissatisfaction finds a way.

Unless you have legally reinforced monopoly.

I’m 28, but I remember hating autocomplete suggestions in UIs and I still do. And they are still here.

It also wouldn’t make much sense in suburbia.

But it’s strange that you don’t have central heating in big densely populated cities located in moderate climate with normal winters.

Let’s hope they ditch.

That’s the justification. Don’t you know what kind of people gets into high governmental positions?

Making some friends rich was the reason.

Still, this sucks huge donkey balls, a lot of very smart and very knowledgeable people, maybe more valuable than a 100 (ok, maybe 10, or maybe 5, it’s a rhetorical device) copies of me, work in such inefficient structures, while there could have been a dozen TSMCs over the world with their competencies.

I have come to agree that nations have interests, but their governmental structures generally work against those. There’s a wheel to be invented there.

Actually, yeah, one can pick 3k people and just pay them 4k$ per month indefinitely till they die and something will remain.

Stagnation, baby.

There’s no corporate death penalty, but there is corporate death from alcoholism, coke overdose and syphilis.

I mean, you do a TRAFU and instead of firing those logically responsible for it you fire your actual troops.

This basically means they failed to find scapegoats inside the company who wouldn’t be management themselves.

Wow.

Windows isn’t the first thing that springs to my mind.

We-ell, this thread kinda started with saying that we’ll see glaring security holes with the same desktop popularity as that of Windows.

Hypothetically yes, but in every single distro out there that I’ve seen no. And most people don’t build their own from scratch.

Well, then it doesn’t require flatpaks and snaps to solve this huge problem, right?

You might have a path where only a certain user has ‘w’ rights, that’s readable by everyone, and software is installed there.

You might use Nix or Guix, which are, while not traditional, still pretty normal package managers without things like bundling dependencies.

So NixOS and GuixSD would be such distributions. Admittedly I’ve never used them, only Guix in another distribution.

Not in all cases, no. There are fringe usecases still being worked on. I’ve been using it since 2016 just fine, but my sister, who is reliant on screen readers, hasn’t been able to.

Well, since you’ve mentioned accessibility, some of us have AuDHD, and while each person is different, for me specifically this means that I can set up CWM or FVWM for X11, but I just can’t set up Hikari for Wayland. That is, I had it kinda working, but the anxiety from setting up that and some terminal emulator with hipster XML config and DPI being wrong just made me say “fsck that” and go back. I could have tried Gnome with Wayland, but my X11 setup is more subjectively usable.

No. It is all of them. It’s a problem with all Debian-based distros, Fedora, SUSE, Arch, you name it. Installer scripts run with root privileges.

OK, I’m not sure, but I think OpenBSD and NetBSD don’t run any scripts contained inside packages. They are not Linux ofc.

Yes… then when you run sudo thinking you’re using whatever command, it can run something entirely different. How don’t you see that as a problem?

Yes, you can do that. You can set aliases which will look like whatever at all. How do you solve that “problem”?

So you download, say, a text editor. Except it’s been compromised (although you don’t know it).

OK, I’ll make a shortcut here and say that if you think this is a problem, the only real fundamentally sane way to solve it is to disallow privilege elevation, say, after single mode, and boot to that in case you need to do some maintenance.

In your mind, that’s not a security hole? That’s intended behaviour? Any program should be able to do that?

I don’t really know what to say to that, other than I disagree wholeheartedly.

Any program that you run. Well, or one can forbid aliasing ‘sudo’ in the shell, of course. But you won’t run out of things which can be aliased to something nasty. It will be the same as rm -rf / advice evolving to rm -rf /*

This essentially all boils down to “I don’t like new things, and despite it being made more secure, I don’t trust it”

No, quite the opposite, I like new things, just in my own direction. Which would be simplification. We’ve had this exponential growth of computing power and complexity and expectations in the last 30 years, which can’t go on.

Again, where you’d use a screwdriver 100 years ago, you’ll still generally use a screwdriver, possibly one as simple as 200 years ago, but with computers we for some reason have to hammer nails with a microscope today.

A personal computer should be as complex as Amiga 500 tops.

Wasting 1000 times the energy to try and make it easier to use than that still hasn’t yielded satisfactory results, for a sane person this means stop.

The rest is just gaslighting.

How are sandboxes “untrusted crap”?

What you run in them is untrusted crap.

yet you seem to prefer X11 over Wayland, and 500 different implementations of the same thing, implemented separately by every app developer,

Yes, what’s standard in X11 has N different variants with Wayland. Correct.

rather than using a standardised xdg-portal

I don’t use it at all.

If you meant that Wayland is simpler than X11, let’s compare them when Wayland reaches feature parity. Also X11 as a standard is simple enough.

I also consider Nix and Guix to be better solutions to some of the problems Flatpak and Snap solve, and Flatpak and Snap to fall short of solving others.

Why is that?

Because a vulnerability in one DE’s file manager, for example, will have smaller impact because many people don’t use that DE.

Same with other things.

Also because that’s something we still had to worry about.

Flatpaks are more secure than system packages. They’re not installed with installation scripts that run as root (and can therefore do anything to your system if malicious code is slipped in.

Not all package managers even run install scripts (from packages) at all.

Flatpaks may contain vulnerable versions of libraries bundles, IIRC. While the one from the normal package manager has been updated.

Flatpaks also have sandboxing. It’s not a perfect implementation mind you, but it’s better than zero sandboxing.

I just don’t like the general direction of this. Running more and more complex and untrusted crap and solving that with more complexity.

I don’t know why you’d be certain of that. New stuff is generally designed from the ground up to be more secure.

More complexity - bigger probability of mistakes. Sometimes fundamental laws are enough.

Look at the absolutely cataclysmic security catastrophe that is X11 compared to Wayland.

I’m afraid of the day that may come where people will say that Emacs is a security catastrophe due to lack of isolation.

Under X11, any program …

This would be the same as under Windows, no?

The X11 system itself runs as root, though. And this opens the door for privilege escalation exploits.

It usually does, but it doesn’t have to.

That’s before we even consider the devs themselves saying that the complexity, decades of spaghetti code, and unfixable bugs make it virtually impossible to patch.

And the new thing to replace that is still not good enough after 10 years or so.

I said that install scripts for repo packages always run as root. And therefore anything that makes its way into the script will be executed with root privileges. That is a risk.

Let’s please not extrapolate the problems of your distribution to all of them.

What do you mean, “so what”?! A non-root program being able to highjack system commands and even gain root access isn’t “so what”, it’s a glaring security hole.

Your user may set aliases for the shell of your user, and the program\script ran by your user can do that.

It’s not a security hole at all. It’s something you should be able to do for any normal use.

X11. It’s insecure by design, yet most distros still ship with it (understandably, since Wayland isn’t 100% yet).

This is a bit overhyped.

packaged software runs as root during the whole installation period - this means that anything slipped into the install script will have full root privileges to do anything to your system. Flatpak does fix this, but normally-packaged software is still abundant.

WTF? Things that run as root, do. Things that don’t, don’t. Obviously most things don’t.

any non-root program can change aliases in your bashrc or bash_aliases file. I.e. they can change “apt install” to some other nefarious command, or to point to a dodgy software repository, so that next time the user types “sudo apt install [XYZ]”, it downloads malware or does other nasty things.

For your own user, so what?

EDIT:

But it’s not an insurmountable problem, IMO. Distros and DEs will just take time to adapt.

Actually it is. One can make levels over levels of isolation, sandboxes and more sandboxes, but in the end conscious hygiene matters most.

And that’s before we even get onto DEs – and much of the desktop Linux stack in general – generally not being designed with security in mind, as it’s not been something they’ve had to worry about.

I’m not sure this is entirely correct. But there’s truth here in the sense that things have been becoming more complex over time, so now an average desktop system has much more packages than 10 years ago, and supply chain vulnerabilities are a thing.

Now, using snap store, flathub and all that is just unhygienic.

We will see more malware, more scams. We will see glaring security problems that were allowed to stay in place for years be exploited. We will see infighting in the Linux community over all of this stuff.

I’m certain most of the failures will be in the new shiny stuff, and thus most of the losses in that infighting too.

Also called a Ponzi scheme, where every participant knows it’s a scam, but hopes to find some more fools before it crashes and leave with positive balance.