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Symbian Won

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Re: Symbian Won

#81

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

AgloeDreams wrote: post #62
maxwellito wrote: post #54

I actually never understood why iOS and Android don't offer the same system browsers offer for the Web. When you pick a file, the OS prompt a screen to navigate through your pictures to pick the item you want and give it to the webpage. Because this workflow is what most of the apps needs. I don't want apps to have access to all my storage system, but just the picture I want to share. The same system could be applied…

they do, the default file picker for iOS has a 'pick file' native command that then pops a system picker and then returns just the selected file but many companies would rather have full access to enable their own experience. In messaging apps, it is seeing the photos in a small view. Instagram has a full screen browser to enable their own chosen UX. Edit: I just saw a really neat alternative view in iOS 14 whereas t…

Third-party apps could provide a custom UX to sensitive data by providing a separate executable that the device's OS then runs in a sandboxed process with read-only access to your sensitive data and without the means of communicating anything with the source app's process. When the user has completed whatever task the sandbox was needed for (e.g. finding a photo from your entire camera-roll or picking contacts) the sandboxed third-party code indicates the selection to the host OS who then does a quick "confirm you want to use these 3 photos?" prompt and then releases only the selected data.

...basically something like WinRT's broker-processes on steroids - or another use case for Apple's "App Extensions" feature but allowing for complete control of the UX more akin to a Photoshop Plugin than being limited to a small number of prescribed use-cases.

Re: Symbian Won

#82

Post by Fnoord »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #48
Fnoord wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A personal firewall is nothing more or less than a layer-7 firewall which rules you can (somehow) manage as user you are logged in with, with a nice GUI. There is Open Snitch [1] (plus forks/patches) for Linux, if you're after such. [1] https://www.opensnitch.io

The page you have linked to won't even open. I have witnessed a number of attempts to replicate LittleSnitch on Linux, none of them went far enough to anything near a usable product quality. You need to implement at least some functionality on the kernel level (what LitleSnitch does with a kernel extension) for this, most of the people who care about desktop apps on Linux (me included) lack kernel developer skills.

True, its not production quality. Here is an actively developed fork/repo of OpenSnitch [1]

[1] https://github.com/gustavo-iniguez-goya/opensnitch

Re: Symbian Won

#83

Post by maxwellito »

AgloeDreams wrote: post #62
maxwellito wrote: post #54

I actually never understood why iOS and Android don't offer the same system browsers offer for the Web. When you pick a file, the OS prompt a screen to navigate through your pictures to pick the item you want and give it to the webpage. Because this workflow is what most of the apps needs. I don't want apps to have access to all my storage system, but just the picture I want to share. The same system could be applied…

they do, the default file picker for iOS has a 'pick file' native command that then pops a system picker and then returns just the selected file but many companies would rather have full access to enable their own experience. In messaging apps, it is seeing the photos in a small view. Instagram has a full screen browser to enable their own chosen UX. Edit: I just saw a really neat alternative view in iOS 14 whereas t…

Wow! It's so rare that I might have never seen it, or completely forgot about it. However, now that you mention it, I think I remember it from my early days on iOS.

Actually the problem is most of apps don't give you the choice between [slick UX + loose control over your data] or [ok UX + perfect control of your data].

If I download Instagram and refuse to access my local storage, I guess I won't be able to share a picture from my phone, right?

Re: Symbian Won

#84

Post by [deleted] »

darksaints wrote: post #53
garaetjjte wrote: post #52

>Symbian: Opening a secure connection. Continue? >IE6: You are about to view pages over a secure connection Why did early 2000' software had such obsession with asking user about secure connection?

More importantly, why did they ask you about secure connections, but automatically assume that insecure connections were okay?

[deleted]

Re: Symbian Won

#85

Post by c0l0 »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #26

> With the latest releases of Android and iOS, we’re back to where we started. Both now prompt you the first time an app asks for access. Both give you regular reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data. Both let you manage access and selectively deny apps. Every OS should do this, desktop OSes included. For the last 2 decades I've been using personal firewalls on Windows to do just this, now I use LittleSnit…

I respectfully disagree. Because it's an EPIC pain, and it's absolutely hostile towards "average" users.

Back in the Android 5 (or so) days, I knew what permissions an app I was going to install on my mother's phone was going to ask to be granted _once_, and be done with it. Nowadays, an app might ask for some kind of new permission "on first use", and users on mobile are developing the same habit as users of desktop browsers during the dark ages of expired HTTPS certificates and broken Java Applet signatures had developed out of necessity: "default-ack/OK all the things".

The problem is that these days, even very technical people think that you could realistically expect to lie with dogs, and get up without fleas - i.e., install applications and software you cannot trust, and get away without having something bad (like loss of privacy, or maybe exfiltration of data) happen. All thanks to "modern" security constructs like sandboxing.

But that is not going to happen - sandboxes have been shattered and broken in the past, as they will continue to get circumvented in the future. There simply is no replacement for trust (in an application, its developers, its distributor, and its operator (if any)), and there are no technical solutions that could somehow replace it in full.

Yes, you can make it incrementally less bad to have a hostile agent/app on your machine or phone, but the trouble you're trying to prevent that way will never go away completely.

I guess some people just liked to feel "in control" when clicking away their "Norton Professional Antivirus 95 blocked 17 Viruses from damaging your machine today!" messages back in the day, and some apparently cherish clicking "grant 'Sexy FileManager Free Pro' access to your Photos and Videos" today. Personally, I'm actually rather sick of it, and all the security theatre that "modern" application delivery mechanisms like app stores/mobile platforms or stuff like snaps/appimage/younameit would have you participate in. I'd rather trust my distro's package maintainers to not let developers abuse their users, and have a look at the source if I'm in doubt about the upstream's intentions. I know I can't audit everything, but I feel like I'm much better off with that kind of trade-off, than with the non-solution to the problem I tried to describe above.

Edit: Removed a leftover part of a restructured sentence.

Re: Symbian Won

#86

Post by secondcoming »

franze wrote: post #77
secondcoming wrote: post #60

I used work for Symbian. The OS itself was great at the time (it's open sourced somewhere), and got security correct (I don't recall 'privacy' ever being an explicit goal) but it was an absolute bitch to develop for. It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++, the learning curve was huge. It tried really hard to have an app ecosystem but it was nothing like what google and apple have today. Net…

My boss at the Austria Press Agency wanted a software to distribute our news to Mobile Phones in 2004 or 5 or so. So I took a deep dive into Symbian with very limited C++ understanding. It took me at least a month to figure that that C++ is not C++ at all. In the end senior engineers, were put on it. Project went nowhere. And then came iPhone and we went down the Mobile Browser Road (years later Apps I think).

They adopted C++ very early on in the language's life. The standard at the time had not even specified how exceptions worked, so Symbian rolled their own (TRAP and User::Leave).

But then they were stuck... breaking ABI was forbidden, so more modern C++ features couldn't be used (easily).

Re: Symbian Won

#87

Post by secondcoming »

pjmlp wrote: post #79
secondcoming wrote: post #60

I used work for Symbian. The OS itself was great at the time (it's open sourced somewhere), and got security correct (I don't recall 'privacy' ever being an explicit goal) but it was an absolute bitch to develop for. It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++, the learning curve was huge. It tried really hard to have an app ecosystem but it was nothing like what google and apple have today. Net…

From the inside it wasn't that apparent, hence why the first Linux based prototypes did not had any radio support. And as cumbersome as Symbian C++ might have been, Android Studio + NDK + JNI wrappers still make me wish for Carbide + Symbian C++ + PIPS.

Originally we used CodeWarrior internally and then Carbide. Most of the Carbide work was done in Dallas and I remember them having a stressful time dealing with Symbian's weird MMP + abld build system.

Re: Symbian Won

#88

Post by simias »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #26

> With the latest releases of Android and iOS, we’re back to where we started. Both now prompt you the first time an app asks for access. Both give you regular reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data. Both let you manage access and selectively deny apps. Every OS should do this, desktop OSes included. For the last 2 decades I've been using personal firewalls on Windows to do just this, now I use LittleSnit…

>if only iptables would allow to filter by the executable path and other process parameters

The problem going down that route is that implementing this opens a huge can of worms. That stuff is easy to spoof, you have to account for thousands of edge cases. It's not for nothing that the answer to "can I know the full path of the binary that was used to spawn ?" is generally "it depends" or "it's complicated". And let's not even bring up what happens for interpreters for instance. Parameters are also often easy to spoof and manipulate, although in this case I suppose the kernel could just keep a protected copy of the original parameters for that purpose.

I completely get why you want that though, and it would be a great feature to have indeed, but I also completely understand why kernel devs don't want to touch that with a ten foot pole.

Re: Symbian Won

#89

Post by moepstar »

onli wrote: post #8

> Both give you regular reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data. Both let you manage access and selectively deny apps. But that's cool with users. It's not annoying, it's more or less a one time thing, maybe a hint more if the app is a bit more unusual. The Symbian notifications? That's a "I hate you, user". Especially the secure connection. Why would it ever ask that? On the other hand, some of those warn…

>>> Especially the secure connection. Why would it ever ask that?

For whatever reason, old Internet Explorers (9? 10? not sure..) do that too...

Re: Symbian Won

#90

Post by shaan7 »

thepangolino wrote: post #22
arpa wrote: post #5

I don't miss symbian. Maemo on the other hand... was a loss. Nokia N900 was absolutely the best smartphone i ever used. Would use it still, but usb port issues forced me to upgrade.

I really liked the Meego iteration. Its UI was top notch.

This guy did it justice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO4iNau8AWM
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