OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure • Hacker News Board

Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure

#131

Post by tres » Sun, Jun 26, 2011, 5:32 PM UTC

seanp2k wrote: post #72

tres wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This statement reveals so much about what's wrong with Microsoft... Good engineering is good user experience.

Good UX engineering is good UX engineering. Software engineering / architecture / development in general is not necessarily the same. An app can be beautifully engineered by have an awful UX. The inverse is less likely to be true (because bugs and obvious flaws like long delays and unresponsive UIs can quickly degrade UX), but still possible.

The problem I was alluding to in my original post is that the user is divorced from the engineering decisions -- as if there can be a better way of building something that doesn't take into account the very reason that it exists at all.

I sincerely hope that Microsoft can turn the ship. They've got lots of really smart people and a lot of cool ideas.

Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure

#132

Post by X-Istence » Sun, Jun 26, 2011, 7:06 PM UTC

dpkendal wrote: post #122

comex wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, is this new in Lion or something? I've never seen that prompt before. (But in any case, there are other options such as clever use of DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES.)

I think it's new in Xcode 4.

This has been the same way in Xcode 3. It isn't new in Xcode 4.

Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure

#133

Post by tobylane » Sun, Jun 26, 2011, 7:12 PM UTC

LaGrange wrote: post #124

tobylane wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recent malware entirely (as I understood) depended on the user putting their password into an OS prompt for permissions for the bad program. How can the OS make the line between that and something safe like Growl or Virtualbox?

Stating the obvious: App Store only software installs, and other DRM solutions. And yes, that has a price that people may or may not be willing to pay. It's somewhat scary, but I'm starting to think that we will be forced to adopt something like that. Computers are used for serious stuff too (payments, medicine, things like that), and, apparently, way too many people can't be trusted to administer their computers sec…

So lets see an option in 10.8, aka Ocelot, where there is a fairly hidden button called Allow non-app store app installs, with a readable (unlike itunes eula), in Security.

Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure

#134

Post by seabee » Mon, Jun 27, 2011, 1:39 AM UTC

joshu wrote: post #105

seabee wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"[Unix permissions] were much better than what was available in Windows for the longest time"? Try DOS. Windows 1.0 - Me were never multi-user operating systems, which was largely the purpose of having permissions, until the world realised just what a mistake it is to have full, unguarded permission to your system files. MS's first multi-user OS was Windows NT in 1993, which shipped with ACLs.

Microsoft Xenix, 1980.

Huh, well I never. Still a UNIX though, so let's say NT was the first one they designed, perhaps.