alt Hacker News> To all the engineers working on this stuff, I hope you're happy that your work is essentially destroying the world that you and I grew up in.
That was a world where the user base was much more limited and devices were less capable. Now we have children, grandparents, educated, and uneducated users with access to web connected devices. These devices now contain everything about you. Compromise of a device can destroy someone’s life.
Not only that, but compromise of a device can cause collateral damage to other devices on the same network.
We now have to cater to every user. Not just to the technologically adept. Look at what people believe on social media. The bar is so low to con people into compromising their device.
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Still a shit poor pathetic excuse to screw over the userscript/grease monkey users.
The browser is called a user agent, but this shift to absolute security no matter what, no say about it is a shift to native apps, is a shift to the developer is in control, is a shift to this being Google and the sites browser, not ours, and that being done unilaterally with nearly no opt outs is the sort of mega tectonic shift that ruins this magical special unique place in software where users had some say in what was happening. We cannot pander to imagined ever worsening users forever.
It feels like the things being done in the name of security are really building an immense prison. The work being done to allow verified age and identity checking ranks up there highly in the this corals humanity, area, not giving us agency.
> That was a world where the user base was much more limited and devices were less capable. Now we have children, grandparents, educated, and uneducated users with access to web connected devices. These devices now contain everything about you. Compromise of a device can destroy someone’s life.
Kids these days have much worse computer skills BECAUSE of the locked up platforms they are exposed to from a young age. Meanwhile two decades ago my non-technical grandpa learned to use a real PC just fine in his old age. Don't underestimate regular users ability to deal with technology when there is a will.
> Compromise of a device can destroy someone’s life.
So in order to prevent a hypothetical hacker bogeyman from getting our data we gladly entrust it to corporations that actively squeeze every possible cent out of it by, among other things, giving access to it to other corporations and uncountable "partners" that will feed us content with the goal of psychologically manipulating us into buying things we don't need, or thinking things someone else wants us to think, destroying the very fabric of society in the process.
I somehow find all of that delusional, our acceptance and support of it nightmarish, and trust hackers to be less diabolical in their schemes.
Computers should serve us, not the other way around. The solution to these problems is tech education, not tech babysitters.
The problem is one of balance.
Write insecure software and you'll get screwed by hackers. Write secure locked down software nobody can touch or modify, and you'll get doubly screwed by a large corporation that wants to pound every penny they can out of your bloody corpse, upto the point your device is compromised by the corporation who can do whatever they want, but you cannot tell.
There is no win situation here, there are only trade offs.