neilhoskins wrote:Oh, come off it. And what happens when the first worms and viruses start spreading? PR disaster, that's what. At least at the moment they can say that Symbian is 100% secure. Yes, I'm angry that apps take so long for developers to get signed, but I don't want Symbian to relax their security model. It also seems to me that there's a lot that can be done with Python. So the word "locked" is, frankly, bollocks.
You are posting absolute FUD.
Here is why:
Let us for a minute imagine that you can allow unsigned apps with any capability on your N95. What would actually happen.
You install them, you still get every single prompt and warning about what capabilities the application has listed in the header, at this point only an idiot would blindly click "ok" - evidently there are millions of idiots, but this adds up to a healthy market for anti-virus and anti-spyware.
The OS does not allow any application to arbitrarily switch off warnings without user intervention. If an app is running and it wants to access the outside world, or to do something bad with certain capabilities, then you are going to get a warning message pop up and ask if it's ok to do it. Having AllFiles and TCB doesn't magically open your phone up to the whole world.
The caged directory structure still exists. Just because you can read /sys and /private doesn't mean you have write access. And even if you did, after the phone reboots, the contents are restored to their original layout anyway, you can't make the changes permanent. You would have to hack the sis files prior to installation in the same way that you already can.
End result, symbian signed is a waste of energy, it exists only as a way for corporations to police and profit from what you do with your handset, nothing more, nothing less.
If you think python is some magical cure then you are delusional. What a great idea, lets waste every ounce of left over CPU power not already taken up with TCB and DRM interpreting and running non-native code. Not only that, lets force people to figure out which of the 200 versions of python they actually need to install in order to get the application to run so that it doesn't break every other python based app already on the phone. Python can do some cute little things, but it doesn't have the capabilities needed to do anything truly useful with the phone.
There are more sides to this issue than you obviously care to accept. The symbian glove doesn't fit everyone, they are doing themselves a big disservice by going down this route.
Symbian, it's the new bog standard useless sony ericsson OS, only the SE OS is about 30 times faster, and the layout infinitely more logical.