Eh... the author is not operating in good faith. Just for starters, this little jab, re web usb:
> This is far from the Hacker News caricature of "letting any web page talk to all of your USB devices."
The author is a meretricious liar. OSes do not randomly download code and run it. More importantly, unlike the author's employers (google and microsoft), they are not in the habit of allowing randoms to pay 1/1000 of a cent per install to run their spyware if you don't use adblock.
Nobody comparing what code gets run on an OS to what code gets run in a browser (eg every time you load a web page) is operating in anything approaching good faith. The risk exposures are nothing alike.
> This is far from the Hacker News caricature of "letting any web page talk to all of your USB devices."
The author is a meretricious liar. OSes do not randomly download code and run it. More importantly, unlike the author's employers (google and microsoft), they are not in the habit of allowing randoms to pay 1/1000 of a cent per install to run their spyware if you don't use adblock.
Nobody comparing what code gets run on an OS to what code gets run in a browser (eg every time you load a web page) is operating in anything approaching good faith. The risk exposures are nothing alike.