I’m not sure that would’ve made a difference. It already makes you go out of your way to force a broken package. This has been discussed in places before but the simple fact of the matter is a user that doesn’t understand what they’re doing will perservere. Putting up barriers is a good thing to do to protect users, spending all your time and effort to cover every edge case is a waste of time because users will find ways to shoot themselves in the foot.

I also feel incredibly uncomfortable with this. Ultimately it comes down to if you trust the application or not. If you do then this isn’t really a problem as regardless they’re getting code execution on your machine. If you don’t, well then don’t install the application. In general I don’t like installing applications that aren’t from my distro’s official repositories but mostly because I like knowing at least they trust it and think it’s safe, as opposed to any software that isn’t which is more of an unknown.

Also it’s unlikely for the script to be malicious if the application is not. Further, I’m not sure a manual install really protects anyone from anything. Inexperienced users will go through great lengths and jump through some impressive hoops to try and make something work, to their own detriment sometimes. My favorite example of this is the LTT Linux challenge. apt did EVERYTHING it could think to do to alert that the steam package was broken and he probably didn’t want to install it, and instead of reading the error he just blindly typed out the confirmation statement. Nothing will save a user from ruining their system if they’re bound and determined to do something.

Fair, should’ve just said shell

…this is so much more cursed than it needs to be. If you want to bash in C just system("echo hello world");

I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand this is incredibly screwed up, on the other hand this kind of surveillance isn’t new in the corporate world and there really shouldn’t be an expectation of privacy on devices issued by a school, company, or anyone other than yourself. I know I would never trust a device that isn’t mine. That doesn’t remotely make it ok to do, I’m just not sure anyone will do anything about this.

“Write it in a paper”…I’m not sure how that works but I am very curious

This will be really interesting, especially given the Firefox fiasco and the fact that chrome is open source. Assuming it stays open source will Google just fork it and make their own chromium browser? Guess we’ll see