[bhhaskin]

I think you miss understood. If the OS becomes the arbiter of what can and cannot be accessed; it's a slippery slope to the OS becoming a walled garden that only approved apps and developers are allowed to operate. Of course that is a pretty large generalization, but we already see it with mobile devices and are starting to see it with windows and Mac OS.

I don't think we should be handing more power to OS makers and away from users. There has to be a middle ground between wall gardens and open systems. It would be much better for node & npm to come up with a solution than locking down access.

[whstl]

The arbiter of what can be accessed should be the user, and always the user. The OS should be merely the enforcer.

Currently OSs are a free-for-all, where the user must blindly trust third-party apps, or they enforce it clumsily like in macOS.

This was fine in 1980 but isn't anymore.