> The ability for us as users to lie to the apps is actually essential to preserving our agency. Without that we're screwed, as now to connect ourselves to the fabric of the society we'll need to find and exploit vulnerabilities that are going to be patched as soon as they become public.

The same freedom is being abused by malicious actors. Even on Windows (like BlackLotus), but also on pre-infected phones emptying people's bank accounts. This is an incredibly unfortunate outcome, but what's the solution?

I see no other potential outcome than that free computing and trusted computing are going to be totally separate. Possibly even on the same device, but not in a way that lets anyone tamper with it.

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seba_dos1 6 hours ago | parent [-]

A lot of other freedoms are being abused and always have been, but somehow we don't go and ban kitchen knives, as having them around is valuable. This is a false dichotomy. Systems can be secure and trusted by the user without having to cede control, and some risks are just not worth eliminating.

Most importantly - it's the user who needs to know whether their system has been tampered with, not apps.

	▲	goblin89 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> somehow we don't go and ban kitchen knives False analogy. You can’t have your kitchen knife exploited by a hacker team in North Korea, who shotgun attacks half of the public Internet infrastructure and uses the proceeds to fund the national nuclear program, can you? (I somewhat exaggerate, but you get the idea.) > Systems can be secure and trusted by the user without having to cede control In an ideal world where users have infinite information and infinite capability to process and internalize it to become an infosec expert, sure. I don’t know about you, but most of us don’t live in that world. I agree it’s not perfect. Having to use liquid glass and being unable to install custom watch faces is ridiculous. There’s probably an opportunity for a hardened OS which can be trusted by interested parties to not be maliciously altered, and also not force so many constraints onto users like current walled gardens do. But a fully open OS, plus an ordinary user who has no time or willingness to casually become a tptacek on the side, in addition to completely unrelated full-time job that’s getting more competitive due to LLMs and whatnot, seems more like a disaster than utopia.
	▲	Avamander 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> but somehow we don't go and ban kitchen knives, as having them around is valuable Some countries do :) Though I think physical analogies are misleading in a lot of ways here. > Systems can be secure and trusted by the user without having to cede control, and some risks are just not worth eliminating. Secure, yes, trustworthy to a random developer looking at your device, no. They're entirely separate concepts. > Most importantly - it's the user who needs to know whether their system has been tampered with, not apps. Expecting users to know things does a lot of heavy lifting here.