
Biggest causes of instability on Windows: malware changing Chrome data on disk - dredmorbius
https://plus.google.com/+PeterKasting/posts/2NnYuCKsGzG
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dredmorbius
The immediate implications of this are bad enough: that there exists what's
essentially a state of open warfare between applications and processes
_running under the same user state_ on Windows.

More generally, though, is the question of whether or not the concept of a
general-purpose computer, in which a user launches applications, without any
central vetting of those applications, or sandboxing of them, is viable.

We've seen earlier models of cooperative co-existence of applications in
memory and processor resource claims give way, through protected memory and
preemptive multitasking. Now the challenge is that individual processes cannot
be trusted to leave well-enough-alone the data of other processes, even under
the same userID.

The questions of how Google chooses to respond to this are interesting (better
armour, more aggressive protection, countermeasures, seperate userspaces...
?). As what this suggests for both OS design (much the same) or software
ecosystems.

I've noted before that the Google Apps store had over 2 million applications
as of 2-3 years ago, a number that's all but certainly grown since. Whilst
Linux is somewhat notorious for having a large number of applications (I
counted 178 entries for "text editor" via 'apt search' on a recent Debian
Jessie install), the same search reveals nearly 260 entries on Google Play.
And several of the Linux entries are support and related packages, not
applications as such.

At what point does a competitive applications marketplace backfire in
encouraging, intentionally or otherwise, Very Bad Behaviour?

Be careful what you incentivise for.

