If only more Linux programs followed sandboxing best practices...

It's not fully sandboxed if it can write to my screen! That filthy app, writing stuff all over the place!

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Sandboxes have been converted into quarantine bomb shelters, for child safety

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Haskell programmers when you tell them the main function isn't pure

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That's why we have Wayland. :)

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What if your app actually needs access to the internet?

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Or actually do anything useful? No network, no filesystem.. it's a hello world app isn't it..

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- No filesystem access for a flatpak app just means it cant read host system files on its own, without user permission. You can still give it files or directories of files through the file explorer for the app to work with, just that it's much safer since it can only otherwise view files in its sandbox.
  
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- There are portals: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/desktop-integration.html#portals . they allow secure access to many features. Also any flatpak app still have access to Private filesystem, just not to the host.
  
  Doesn't work for all applications but for many sand boxing is possible without a loss of features.
  
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- There's Obfuscate, an image redactor, and Metadata Cleaner which is self-descriptive. Both works properly without any filesystem access at all, because they use the file picker portal to ask the user for the files to be processed.
  
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- Portal.
  
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Oh come on, what modern program actually needs to communicate or access the file system?

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- Exactly all programs should be web based cloud subscription only. We don't want that filthy code on our rgb nvme drives
  
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The app can then declare the network permission and it will still be marked as safe.

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Download the internet along with it!

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- I'm self-hosting the entire internet. I hope you guys are enjoying yourselves.
  
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- I remember in 1995-ish or something when I used the internet for the first time using the Netscape browser.... And I was asking a friend if he had tried all the web sites yet. Just got a weird look back.... :) I didn't know what the internet was back then at first.
  
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your app needing internet access it's bad practice! offline gang

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I like how the app name is blacked out so as not to dox the flathub app.

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Wouldn't want bad actors to find privacy respecting software.

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Sanboxed from prying eyes, it's completely safe.

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Why is it censored lol

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It's actually Dippi but I don't want to look like I'm advertising it here

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!peepee !< is safe

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This kind of thing could work for a few apps, say a color picker utility or a QR code generator etc.

Looking at the docs, it isn't clear if apps can write to their own namespace (instead of writing to user folders directly), but if they can, we could expand the scope to games like supertuxkart, 2048 etc, which would then be able to save user milestones and progress in their own area - a bit like how Android apps do it

https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/sandbox-permissions.html

It's a great start IMO, although admittedly there is still work to do. Flatpak atm bridges the gap with allowing new apps, requiring new libs, to run on older stable/LTS distros

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Yes, they can. There are app-specific folders in .local that flatpaks can read and write to specifically for this purpose, and also the file picking dialog may give access to the one specific file you picked.

Android IMO has great usability in exposing a database to apps, which means they aren't required to ship their own database engine.

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- Get a database, data que and service mesh and we can have an advanced k8s style platform.
  
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Likes like Hello World is ready to ship.

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With a bit of modifying code to use the color picker and maybe rearranging the workflow to adapt to the new system, apps as advanced as DaVinci Resolve and LibreOffice can have permissions as restrictive as this (the network permission would of course may be needed but it would still be marked as Safe by Flathub).

You can use the file picker API to open the files or folders your app would need to access while having no filesystem permissions at all. You can access the camera, microphone, and GPS without the user devices portal, by simply using the respective portals where the user has the power to allow or deny access to such devices as they wish.

You can record the screen, take a screenshot, and pick a color in the screen by simply calling the proper portals, with the bonus that the user will be able to select if they want the entire screen, a specific window, or a specific area to be recorded/captured and whether the cursor should be shown or not.

Heck, even TeamViewer can be as this restricted without losing any functionality if they use the Screen Cast portal which allows apps to mirror input from a remote device! They would of course need the network permission, but that's still safe.

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- Does all of this require flatpack specific APIs?
  
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this sandbox craze is slowly pushing things back to the point where we used cartridges and booted off from them straight to the program. who needs an OS at this point? it's bundled with the app anyway 😆

/s, somewhat

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It's nice to see good app security being praised. Sometimes it feels like some people on lemmy (and the fediverse) throw security to the wind.

Like one time I had heard someone over on Mastodon say that they thought that HTTPS was too overused and shouldn't have been everywhere because it makes older apps unable to access sites and also made adblocking just ever so slightly harder.

Which yeah, I love adblockers, but I'm definitely not comfortable with all traffic having to go unencrypted just for it.

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But my 1998 Windows CE device that's made obsolete by those meddling modern security practices!

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This is useful for proprietary software.

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As well as FOSS too. Sandboxing is a security standard that should be followed by every software how open their code may be.

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What is this? A solitaire game?

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This could well be an advanced video editor or an office suite if they take full advantage of the portals API without losing any functionality. Well, they can have the network permission, it would still be safe anyway.

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- I agree with you
  
  however this program can't even create files, although I may have misunderstood it
  
  how are you supposed to save your work?
  
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Permanently Deleted

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Does it have to be sandboxed?

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An app should not be able to access stuff the user did not consent to letting access.

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- Isn't that what file system permissions are for?
  
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Cool

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Still not worth dependency hell.

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Flatpak reduces dependency hell... and proper sandboxing has nothing to do with dependency hell.

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Relevance?

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Why does it look like itoddler ui?

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Linux users (sometimes):

sees an extremely user-friendly interface - so good that everyone and their grandma can use it perfectly right away without any explanation

"Ugh, why doesn't this look more complicated?"

Edit: This was in response to someone commenting "Why does it look like toddler UI?". The comment seems to be deleted now.

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- Haha so true, and I say this as a Linux user for like 20 years. There are some Linux users who value functionality over form so much that they prefer cluttered user interfaces with tiny borders to maximize screen space.
  
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looking nice and readable is just cool and good

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They successfully applied the gnome design guidelines.

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- Yikes it looks just like a mobile or tablet.
  
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Here is the way to 4chan >>> ___

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