There is no reason for a tool to implicitly access my mounted cloud drive directory and browser cookies data.
Linux has this capability, of course. And it seems like MacOS prompts me a lot for "such and such application wants to access this or that". But I think it could be a lot more fine-grained, personally.
iOS and Android both implement these security policies correctly. Why can't desktop operating systems?
The most popular desktop OSes have decades of pre-existing software and APIs to support and, like a lot of old software, the debt of choices made a long time ago that are now hard/expensive to put right.
The major desktop OSes are to some degree moving in this direction now (note the ever increasing presence of security prompts when opening "things" on macOS etc etc), but absent a clean sheet approach abandoning all previous third party software like the mobile OSes got, this arguably can't happen easily over night.
Linux people are very resistant to this, but the future is going to be sandboxed iOS style apps. Not because OS vendors want to control what apps do, but because users do. If the FOSS community continues to ignore proper security sandboxing and distribution of end user applications, then it will just end up entirely centralised in one of the big tech companies, as it already is on iOS and macOS by Apple.
There is no such thing as computer security, in general, at this point in history.
Indeed. Why lock your car door as anyone can unlock and steal it by learning lock-picking?
That subtlety is important because it explains how the backdoors have snuck in — most people feel safe because they are not targeted, so there's no hue and cry.
Not sure how something can be called a sandbox without the actual box part. As Siri is to AI, Flatpak is to sandboxes.
You can use the underlying sandboxing with bwrap. A good alternative is firejail. They are quite easy to use.
I prefer to centralize package management to my distro, but I value their sandboxing efforts.
Personally, I think it's time to take sandboxing seriously. Supply chain attacks keep happening. Defense is depth is the way.
I think you mean a lot of flak? Slack would kind of be the opposite.
Think about it from a real world perspective.
I knock on your door. You invite me to sit with you in your living room. I can't easily sneak into your bed room. Further, your temporary access ends as soon as you exit my house.
The same should happen with apps.
When I run 'notepad dir1/file1.txt', the package should not sneakily be able to access dir2. Further, as soon as I exit the process, the permission to access dir1 should end as well.
For FreeBSD there is capsicum, but it seems a bit inflexible to me. Would love to see more experiments on Linux and the BSDs for this.
It's listed as the third most popular IDE after Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio by respondents to Stack Overflow's annual survey. Interestingly, it's higher among professionals than learners. Maybe that's because learners are going to be using some of those newer AI-adjacent editors, or because learners are less likely to be using Windows at all.
I'm sure people will leap to the defense of their chosen text editor, like they always do. "Oh, they separated vim and Neovim! Those are basically the same! I can combine those, really, to get a better score!" But I think a better takeaway is that it's incredible that Notepad++, an open source application exclusive to Windows that has had, basically, a single developer over the course of 22 years, has managed to reach such a widespread audience. Especially when Scintilla's other related editors (SciTE, EditPlus) essentially don't rate.
You can use the 2022 (ie. pre-chatgpt) results for control for that. The results are basically the same.
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technolog...
For something functionality close I would look at Kate.
Naive question, but isn't this relatively safe information to expose for this level of attack? I guess the idea is to find systems vulnerable to 0-day exploits and similar based on this info? Still, that seems like a lot of effort just to get this data.
You don't need 0days when you already have RCE on an unsandboxed system.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/02/notepad-updater-was...
I recommend removing notepad++ and installing via winget which installs the EXE directly without the winGUP updater service.
Here's an AI summary explaining who is affected.
Affected Versions: All versions of Notepad++ released prior to version 8.8.9 are considered potentially affected if an update was initiated during the compromise window.
Compromise Window: Between June 2025 and December 2, 2025.
Specific Risk: Users running older versions that utilized the WinGUp update tool were vulnerable to being redirected to malicious servers. These servers delivered trojanized installers containing a custom backdoor dubbed Chrysalis.
What's concerning is the 6-month window. Supply chain attacks are difficult to detect because the malicious code runs with full user permissions from a "trusted" source. Most endpoint protection isn't designed to flag software from a legitimate publisher's update infrastructure.
For organizations, this argues for staged rollouts and network monitoring for unexpected outbound connections from common applications. For individuals, package managers with cryptographic verification at least add another barrier - though obviously not bulletproof either.
Could this be the attacker? The scan happened before the hack was first exposed on the forum.
troad•1h ago
TingPing•56m ago
krater23•48m ago
GauntletWizard•55m ago
worksonmine•50m ago
krater23•48m ago
worksonmine•35m ago
Do you mean I should worry about the fixed CVEs that are announced and fixed for every other distribution at the same time? Is that the supply-chain attack you're referring to?
taftster•49m ago
Sadly, it feels like Microsoft updates lately have trended back towards being unreliable and even user hostile. It's messed up if you update and can't boot your machine afterwards, but here we are. People are going to turn off automatic updates again.
_carbyau_•30m ago
Using notepad++ (or whatever other program) in a manner that deals with internet content a lot - then updating is the thing.
Using these tools in a trusted space (local files/network only) : then don't update unless it needs to be different to do what you want.
For many people, something in between because new files/network-tech comes and goes from the internet. So, update occasionally...
gruez•19m ago
Disagree. It's hard to screw up a text editor so much that you have buffer overflows 10 years after it's released, so it's probably safe. It's not impossible, but based on a quick search (though incomplete because google is filled with articles describing this incident) it doesn't look like there were any vulnerabilities that could be exploited by arbitrary input files. The most was some dubious vulnerability around being able to plant plugins.
gruez•23m ago
Marsymars•13m ago
https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/reference/supply-ch...