This is fallacious reasoning. A well intentioned open source developer who does not earn any money out of a labor of love has no incentive to further spend money to sign his app that he’s giving away for free anyway. On the flip side, a malicious actor that expects to earn money through a scam has every incentive to spend some money making the app look legit, especially if there is no risk involved.

> Which is fair -- as you note, not every scammer will be scared off by the need to spend some money to pull the scam off; but some will, so the ratio of legitimate developers to illegitimate ones will be higher in markets where there's some cost to entry.

The big scammers, the ones who are the most likely to have an actual business plan for selling my information, aren't.

Note that I know Adobe is "trusted" in the relevant sense.

Note that I don't think Adobe is trustworthy in any real sense.

The good scammers absolutely will not be scared off by the need to pay a penny to steal a dollar. You have to buy a cheap watch/violin/purse if you want to pass it off as an expensive one. You have to pay off in the back of the operation if you want to keep cash coming in through the front. Indeed, one of the easy ways to short-circuit human trust defenses is to make a show of trust first, such as by placing personal assets at risk. "Here, I'll trust you to hold my wallet full of $500 cash, while I drive your expensive late-model car--that's worth even more when shipped to mainland China--to go get help. You know I'm coming back, because $500 is a lot of money."

The scheme shifts the need to trust from Random Q. Hacker to the certificate-issuing authority, and that only helps if the authority is more trustworthy than the individual. If they don't put forth an effort to really dig in to those applying for certificates, they're just selling costumes for the security theater.

I trust Microsoft more than someone I have never heard of, but I don't inherently trust them more than the informal assembly of Notepad++ contributors and lead FOSS developer Don Ho. If Microsoft's code-signing certificate validation process is not capable of recognizing organizations that are not formally incorporated, and allowing them to use the name of their brand, rather than the names of their lead developers or maintainers, they are leaving a huge fraction of my installs hanging in the wind.

> not every scammer will be scared off by the need to spend some money to pull the scam off; but some will

The same goes for developers, as you can see in this article.

It is not fair. The same cost in money does not translate to the same cost in efforts to earn trust. This is structural discrimination.

So the person who spends the most amount of money is the one you trust the most? That's some interesting reasoning. Does that mean if I spend $21 you trust me more than the guy who spends $20?

Exactly! I trust "you must do some things to obtain this" more than I trust "you don't have to do anything".

The part you're missing is that they won't be in practice. There's malware on virustotal with (still) valid code-signing certs.

Is that actually true? How many people, when installing Photoshop, actually look at who issued the cert?