This doesn’t solve the problem either, which is that of the Confused Deputy [1]. An arbitrary piece of code I’m downloading shouldn’t be able to run as Ryan by default with access to everything Ryan has.

We need to revitalize research into capabilities-based security on consumer OSs, which AFAIK is the only thing that solves this problem. (Web browsers - literally user “agents” - solve this problem with capabilities too: webapps get explicit access to resources, no ambient authority to files, etc.)

Solving this problem will only become more pressing as we have more agents acting on our behalf.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confused_deputy_problem

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_3u10 2 days ago | parent [-]

I’ve never seen code that is downloaded run itself. Why not be the change you want to see in the world and run sudo or spawn your browser in a jail. Or download as another user.

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endymi0n 2 days ago | parent [-]

Welcome to npm post-install scripts... https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/using-npm/scripts

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okanat 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

And Rust build scripts: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/build-scripts.html

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johnny22 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

glad pnpm disables those by default!

	▲	skeeter2020 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		PSA: if you're using (a newish release of) npm you should have something like this as a default, unless you've got good reasons not to: min-release-age=7 # days ignore-scripts=true