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Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm a cynical old man, but all these ArtCraft apps feel a bit too good to be true?

They come out of nowhere (sort of), and they're just a bit long-con trojan horse for some point in the future where the userbase will have to pay the piper.

I hope I'm wrong!

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Agreed. Especially given that I downloaded one app and got a generic launcher instead that then allowed me to download a specific app.

Fork and roll your own.

That's not my point at all.

If these apps eventually have millions of users, most of whom will just be downloading the binary releases and using auto-update to get the latest version through some opaque updater, what's to stop a future update from being nefarious?

Adobe customers are asking that exact same question

This is how software outside gatekept marketplaces always worked.

I would argue it happens even inside marketplaces. We've seen the authors of popular Chrome extensions take payouts and sell their extensions to new owners who have bad intentions for the userbase.

Isn't that the risk of literally any software?

Yes, but there used to be a gatekeeping effect because the development of huge software packages like LibreOffice was too capital-intensive to be enticing for a criminal enterprise. If you have malicious intent and know your way around software, finding a security defect and exploiting it for the umpteenth ransomware campaign is much easier than building a full office suite from scratch and getting a userbase going in order to sneak malware in years down the line. The implied fear is that coding chatbots may make this attack economically viable.

Certainly but often there's a company or well-known entity behind popular software, so that brings some accountability to the table.

In this case, these ArtCraft apps are one person I think?

Why would I want to maintain my own fork of a productivity application for personal use?

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