Wednesday, August 28, 2019

ZDNet: Android Google Play app with 100 million downloads starts to deliver malware.

Other than for the app's users, I fail to see how this isn't a win for the community as a whole.

The problem inherent with using someone else's software is that it is just that—someone else's software! You're trusting them with access to your stuff. Often all of your stuff.  When your getting the software through a third party repository: you're also trusting the distributor to not do anything nasty.

Rather than bitch and moan: we should celebrate that it was detected and dealt with, and decry those who violated that trust from their users.

People often underestimate the trust that running other people's stuff on your machine means. One of the great things about modern operating systems like Android and iOS is they tend to silo data from applications behind permission brokering. Traditionally the applications you run on a computer have the same access to it that you do. That made sense when computers were few and rarely networked beyond multiple serial terminals. Increasingly less so when you can just download a .exe file and it can do whatever you could.

Trust matters! Respect your users.

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