Dissemination of malleable software

General
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If we want to spread the code that users create to other people, we need to deal with the problem of trust.

Trust is needed when you can’t review the code yourself, ie if you are a simple user, or do not have the time.

Especially for UI code, I don’t think there are ways to solve this problem technically. It requires a reviewing process. I am interested to hear if someone believes that we can technically do that. My reasoning is that the way information is displayed to the user can mislead him.

For this reason, designing a reviewing process is indispensable for the increase of software diversity.

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I don’t think there’s a technical solution, but there’s a more direct and obvious solution than a review process: going through people you know. Word of mouth. Web of trust.

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Here’s an article I have written on that topic (in the context of scientific computing):

https://osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/nt96q

No pure-tech solutions, but a mixture of social processes and tech adapted to those processes.

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I don’t think it fully solves the problem, but object capabilities to restrict power of code should be used to at least make things safer to run.

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