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The browser is the sandbox

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Re: The browser is the sandbox

#41

Post by AlienRobot »

The browser being the sandbox isn't a good thing. It's frankly one of the greatest failures of personal computer operating systems.

Can you believe that if you download a calculator app it can delete your $HOME? What kind of idiot designed these systems?

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#42

Post by ijustlovemath »

ape4 wrote: post #36
ijustlovemath wrote: post #18

I've found it interesting that systemd and Linux user permissions/groups never come into the sandboxing discussions. They're both quite robust, offer a good deal of customization in concert,and by their nature, are fairly low cost.

cgroups are part of whats used to implement docker and podman

True, and they do indeed offer an additional layer of protection (but with some nontrivial costs). All (non-business killing) avenues should be used in pursuit of defense in depth when it comes to sandboxing. You could even throw a flatpak or firejail in, but that starts to degrade performance in noticeable ways (though I've found it's nice to strive for this in your CI).

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#43

Post by rcarmo »

tdhz77 wrote: post #11

[flagged]

As someone who's been blogging since 2002, I can tell you first hand that you get a fair amount of outreach. But I even though I have had to put Simon's feed through a summarizer to be able to keep up, I don't see any bias there--just _a lot_ of writing about whatever he's interested in, and either our own perceptions of what is interesting and the law of averages inevitably kick in and there are a few duds here and there.

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#45

Post by Semaphor »

chime wrote: post #37
stevefan1999 wrote: post #4

We never say that it isn't. There is a reason Google developed NaCl in the first place that inspired WebAssembly to become the ultimate sandbox standard. Not only that, DOM, JS and CSS also serves as a sandbox of rendering standard, and the capability based design is also seen throughout many browsers even starting with the Netscape Navigator. Locking down features to have a unified experience is what a browser shoul…

> Sidenote: Flash's scripting language, ActionScript is also directly responsible for the generational design of Java-ahem-ECMAScript later on, also TypeScript too. I feel like I am the only one who absolutely loved ActionScript, especially AS3. I wrote a video aggregator (chime.tv[1]) back in the day using AS3 and it was such a fun experience. 1. https://techcrunch.com/2007/06/12/chimetv-a-prettier-way-to-...

> I feel like I am the only one who absolutely loved ActionScript,

I never really worked with it, but it seems whenever it comes up here or on Reddit, people who did, miss it. I think the authoring side of Flash is remembered very positively.

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#46

Post by nextaccountic »

tdhz77 wrote: post #11

[flagged]

I don't understand this criticism. Most agents today are running with no sandboxing at all. Every person has to figure out how they will sandbox each agent (run under bubblewrap? container-use? what about random MCP servers, do they need to be sandboxed separately?) on an ad hoc basis. Most people don't bother with it.

And then you see the recent vulnerabilities in opencode for example. The current model is unsustainable

It would be great if desktop Linux adopted a better security model (maybe inspired by Android). So far we got this https://xkcd.com/1200/ and it's not sufficient

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#47

Post by zkmon »

Coding agents may become trivial artifacts to be assembled by developers themselves from libraries, given the well-defined workflow. If it is a homegrown agent then you probably don't need a sandbox to run in.

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#48

Post by rzmmm »

tdhz77 wrote: post #11

[flagged]

He is a familiar blogger for HN readers, has been for a long time. While I agree the posts are nowadays a bit repetitive, he has also very interesting non-AI content. Some people probably upvote because they like the author, not necessarily the content.

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#49

Post by nextaccountic »

ijustlovemath wrote: post #18

I've found it interesting that systemd and Linux user permissions/groups never come into the sandboxing discussions. They're both quite robust, offer a good deal of customization in concert,and by their nature, are fairly low cost.

Unix permissions were written at a time where the (multi user) system was protecting itself from the user. Every program ran at the same privileges of the user, because it wasn't a security consideration that maybe the program doesn't do what the user thinks it does. That's why in the list of classic Unix tools there is nothing to sandbox programs or anything like that, it was a non issue

And today this is.. not sufficient. What we require today is to run software protected from each other. For quite some time I tried to use Unix permissions for this (one user per application I run), but it's totally unworkable. You need a capabilities model, not an user permission model

Anyway I already linked this elsewhere in this thread but in this comment it's a better fit https://xkcd.com/1200/

Re: The browser is the sandbox

#50

Post by fsflover »

nextaccountic wrote: post #49
ijustlovemath wrote: post #18

I've found it interesting that systemd and Linux user permissions/groups never come into the sandboxing discussions. They're both quite robust, offer a good deal of customization in concert,and by their nature, are fairly low cost.

Unix permissions were written at a time where the (multi user) system was protecting itself from the user. Every program ran at the same privileges of the user, because it wasn't a security consideration that maybe the program doesn't do what the user thinks it does. That's why in the list of classic Unix tools there is nothing to sandbox programs or anything like that, it was a non issue And today this is.. not suff…

This is why my daily driver is https://qubes-os.org
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