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Posts: 474 | Thanked: 283 times | Joined on Oct 2009 @ Oxford, UK
#100
Originally Posted by qole View Post
lbt's blog (thanks, qgil) raised a good point that has bothered me for a while now. With all of its new telephony features, the N900 can be seriously exploited by hackers, and we're going to have to work as a community to, as qgil said, encourage Extras apps and discourage the use of random, unknown repositories.

Having seen how easy it is to make a silly app for Facebook and get everyone to use it, it sends shivers down my spine to think of how hackers could post an .install file that points to a malicious repository full of nasty trojans and exploits disguised as fun little games.
I agree and think this could become a big issue fast.

Android has non-standard changes to Linux, I'm guessing to help address this sort of thing.

Fortunately Linux provides containers and they are getting almost mature now ;-) which could be used for sandboxing even quite low-level apps with no significant loss in performance. For most apps, I'd expect they could run in a container quite well. They can still share libraries (Gtk, Qt etc.), including sharing the memory at run time with code outside the container or in other containers, and sharing config files, if the files are managed well.
 

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