Apple okays Epic Games marketplace app in Europe

Most restaurants of any kind will not let you enter with your own drink or food, so your example can be made both ways.

You're not demanding customization of your iPhone before purchasing it: worse, you're demanding it after your purchase, even though there's no unclarity as to how an iPhone works.

I doubt that the people here have the same entitlement towards other businesses as they have towards Apple. Or at least I hope so.

Of course a lot of this is Zoom vs. Google Meet, I'm sure a lot of the things I like about Zoom work fine in the browser - but not as well as with the simultaneous video streams limitation.

You can cost out security, but a lot of the things that I love about Zoom's native app are truly priceless - it means I can see and hear more of people I care about. Another thing is supporting dual monitors with different screens, it makes it very easy to rearrange and see more than one person I want to see at a glance. You can do it with multiple browsers and so on, but it's more fiddly and you spend more time fussing with the screens, which means less time actually paying attention to the people.

Back in the desktop days, Regular Joe had malware that they have no idea was on their system.

> (with my data backed up), I reset my phone. It's software, not a serial killer.

What it is, however, is a thief. Lots of people have juicy secrets, that's why privacy is important in the first place.

Malware is very good at keeping hidden these days, running unspotted for a long time.

Someone cleans out your bank account, or gets blackmail material on you, backup won't do jack. This is also why certain apps, including banking, include tests to make sure they're not on a rooted device.

> So I don't count that as a bonus/demerit to any given platform.

Sounds like you only accept silver bullet "solutions".

Scare quotes because nothing ever is.

The questions are "how often" and "where can be done about it", the answers are not "yes" and "turn it off and on again".

> I already gave a reason

And I showed why it wasn't sufficient.

If you think open source will keep you safe, you are treating it as the exact silver bullet you're criticising Apple for not being.

> Thars a better check and balance than some conglomerate who never had my best interests in mind.

There's no real balance, and the checks are insufficient — there are definitely bugs that only get spotted a decade later, there are definitely state-sponsored flaws in OSS code, definitely some cases of normal criminals buying off some projects, and definitely cases where we don't find out about these things until much later.

And of course, quite a lot of OSS projects are in fact directly funded and managed by a corporation — the cathedral and the bazaar have both blended into a metaphorical Amazon marketplace, complete with fake reviews for fake products.

To reason by analogy, this is like me suggesting you wear a seatbelt while driving a car and you responding by saying: "well you're at risk the moment you step outside of your house, so if you really have no tolerance for injury you should simply not leave the house". You're saying instead of opening Zoom in the browser I should delete all personal data from my computer, and for what end? I'm doing this so that I can attend virtual dance parties efficiently? I don't understand how any rational cost benefit analysis could yield such a conclusion.

> "would I prefer to open myself up to attack, or would I prefer not to deliver this message at all?"

This is absolutely a false dichotomy. The choice isn't between sending data and not sending data, the choice is between sending data in the browser vs sending the same data within a desktop application.

> You need to do a complete threat model and explain how Zoom contributes to that risk,

The Zoom desktop clients have had RCE vulnerabilities where hackers were able to remotely execute arbitrary code on victims computers with zero user input required from the victims (they demonstrated this by remotely opening the calculator app). It's very obvious how Zoom contributes to that risk. "A zero-day vulnerability in Zoom which can be used to launch remote code execution (RCE) attacks has been disclosed by researchers. The researchers from Computest demonstrated a three-bug attack chain that caused an RCE on a target machine, and all without any form of user interaction [...] an animation of the attack in action demonstrates how an attacker was able to open the calculator program of a machine running Zoom following its exploit. As noted by Malwarebytes, the attack works on both Windows and Mac versions of Zoom [...] The browser version of the videoconferencing software is not impacted." [1]

> Practically speaking I have conversations in public places all the time and I don't stress about the possibility that someone might be recording me with a parabolic microphone.

Do you yell out your bank account number and routing number in public because you think the user experience of finding a private place to talk is too burdensome? Because that's metaphorically what you're arguing for.

[1] https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/04/09/209227/critical-zoom-...