I feel like in the last 5-10 years it has really gone a direction I don't consider progress,
That depends on how you define "progress". From a user point of view, small steps happen, mostly to keep users interested. From the point of view of those running the
spy uhm
advertising uhm cloud services, huge steps have been taken. People have been sucked in, so they can inspect whatever you store there (you do agree to that).
Back in the early days of OS/2, IBM came out with a plan to do something similar. The idea was to make a PC smart enough to attach to the IBM service (not called "cloud"), where they would be able to start a program (paid per use, or on contract), and run it. The data was supposed to stay on the users computer. That idea went nowhere, mostly because the internet was way too slow.
The browser is a weak point.
Actually any ported windows program can have holes in it, but the browser (including Thunderbird) has huge holes in it. The main protection, that we have, is that malware usually just crashes the program, or itself.
Not long ago, I got some "Smart plugs" from Amazon (Yuton brand specifically). After plugging one in, I noticed a constant, low level, network activity. I checked my firewall, and it wasn't blocking it, but there was a constant probe of port 6667, on every attached device (all OS/2, at the time) from the Smart plug. That, in itself was not malicious, but it didn't make any sense (the excuse was, that that is how the devices connect to the "cloud", so they could be turned on/off). So I fire walled my windows machines, immediately. A few days later, when I started up Firefox (OS/2) Something started to cause process dumps, about every 10 seconds. When I investigated that, it was a program called HELLO. When I investigated that, it was probably one of those things that encrypts your data, with an offer to decrypt it, if you pay <whatever> within a few hours. So, technically, the plugs didn't cause the problem, but what they did, was open the path through port 6667 (internet relay chat), and as soon as something (Firefox) opened the port, it was in, and tried to run. If it had actually succeeded, it probably still wouldn't do much damage, because of an unknown directory structure, but. After that, I also had some weird settings in my router. Fortunately, a factory reset fixed that problem. The plugs went back, since they didn't seem to be interested in fixing the problem.
So, OS/2 saved me, that time. Over the years, I have often noticed that Firefox would simply crash, for no obvious reason. I assume that some of those crashes were bad code in Firefox, but I am pretty sure that a lot of them were malware trying to do something.
One BIG problem, that we do have, is that we don't have any virus protection. We do have CLAMAV, but that is mostly not usable, for a number of reasons (super SLOW is one of them, even when using CLAMD, which uses HUGE amounts of upper shared memory).
no one is really going to bother with making viruses and trying to hack OS/.2.
The biggest exposure, is that one of them could actually run, by accident. Chances are, that it wouldn't do what it was designed to do, but it could still do severe damage. Our best defense is to have good, tested backups, that are done on a regular basis.
@Dave: PLEASE don't make suggestions about how to do it.
