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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

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Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#871

Post by mjhoy »

soraminazuki wrote: post #428
mjhoy wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 — Sure. But Nix isn't exactly the most friendly package manager to begin with. I wouldn't recommend it if you're not comfortable creating volumes. 2 — Could you explain? Mine is on and working, I didn't need to do anything else. 3 — Is this if you have login items that need nix to be available? I don't have this so I haven't noticed. 4 — I've never run into this, but again I might just not use Nix for the kind of t…

It's not that installing Nix is impossible on macOS, it's just that it has some hard-to-ignore limitations now. 1. Having to create a volume when a plain old directory should suffice is insane. It's creating a hassle for no good reason for users. 2. /nix would be unencrypted by default if kept in a separate volume. There's also the problem of how to unlock it upon boot. 3. Login items is a very common use case so not…

Thanks for explaining! It sounds like I am just lucky with my set up not to run into issues. Hopefully they come up with a solution soon.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#872

Post by john_alan »

I can see the delay when I remove my terminal from the DevTools permission in Security preferences.

So it's real.

However, scripts are NOT notarised, so what is it doing?

EDIT:

So after digging the scripts are being "checked" for malware, as part of XProtect.

This is interesting, it seems to be hashing scripts and testing to see if its known malware.

Anyway, easy to disable, but weird stuff.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#873

Post by Yetanfou »

saagarjha wrote: post #865
Yetanfou wrote: post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if using macOS enables me to be a more effective FOSS contributor? How would that work? When you build a house on rented ground the house may seem to be yours but it can always be taken away from you.

I’m familiar with macOS and contribute to a number of FOSS projects from it. I’m less productive on other platforms.

In that case you'd do both yourself and those who depend on you for your contributions a favour by taking some of that time to get acquainted with alternative platforms seeing as how Apple seems to be on a course which will make it harder and harder to use their platform for this purpose. Like the Boy Scouts (used to) say, "Be Prepared!". Install a (few) Linux/BSD distribution(s) in a VM and try using those for a while to get a feel of the platform and its strengths/weaknesses so you have somewhere to land when the time comes.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#874

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

derefr wrote: post #231
jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would sandboxing be slower? They are definitely doing something way too slow.

Apple replaced the very simple (i.e. function fits in a cache line; inputs fit in a single dword) BSD user/group/other filesystem privileges system, with a Lisp interpreter (or maybe compiler? not sure) executing some security DSL[1][2]. [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Sandbox/OS_X_Rule_Set [2] https://reverse.put.as/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Apple-Sand... This capabilities-ruleset interpreter is what Apple uses the te…

> Much of this stuff can be cached between grant requests, but some of it will inevitably have to hit the disk (or the network!) for a lookup—in the middle of a blocking syscall.

Running any kind of I/O during a capability check is a broken design.

There is no reason to hit the disk (it should be preloaded), much less the network (such a design will never work if offline).

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#875

Post by fluffything »

HappyDreamer wrote: post #709
drvdevd wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I scrolled all the way down this thread for - to see if anyone thinks this is a good design/security decision on Apples part. I’m trying to understand what the reasoning is for this particular decision and if it actually makes the OS more secure in any meaningful way? Or does it actually- just degrade performance with very limited benefits? Are there any real benefits to this VS current security design i…

Couldn't this have been a business decision? Not about security? (just what they say?) To make non-App-store apps annoyingly unusable, so the App store will sell more apps, instead of people downloading in other ways? Just like Apple cripples the Safari browser and PWA apps. Long term, maybe Apple wants to be able to remote-forbid apps if Apple is developing their own competing app? Whilst most developers working at…

Most of the apps that sell well originate from a developer solving a need they had, on the system they were using.

If this drives developers from OSX to other OSes, chances are they will develop apps for those OSes first.

Apple is too big to fail at this point, but driving developers away from your platform isn't a very clever strategy. You never know when you are going to hit a tipping point, and after you notice and people stop using macosx for development its already too late.

It took me ~150 hours to migrate to Linux, but my user and developer experience on Linux is much better than on MacOSX (emacs daemon "just works"!!!), so after all that work I wouldn't consider switching to OSX in the next 5 years at least. I had a Macbook air 2012, and because Apple still hasn't released a laptop that isn't a downgrade from that in some sense (keyboard, magsafe, ...) I've went with a think pad instead. Tiny details, like having a webcam that doesn't suck now prevent me from going back to OSX.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#876

Post by la_oveja »

rurban wrote: post #757
usmannk wrote: post #484

It seems like there is a lot of confusion here as to whether this is real or not. I've been able to confirm the behavior in the post by: - Using a new, random executable. Even echo $rand_int will work. Edit: What I mean here is generate your rand int beforehand and statically include it in your script. - Using a fresh filename too. Just throw a rand int at the end there. e.g. /tmp/test4329.sh I MITMd myself while rec…

It's called lockdown for a reason. Apple was just the very first to implement centralized binary blacklisting, revocation. They call it notarization. Problem is, that they did it unannounced. There must be really some weird stuff going on in those managers heads. How can they possibly think to go away with that?

First? Windows SmartScreen has checked for malicious binaries since Windows 8.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#877

Post by Yetanfou »

pietrovismara wrote: post #854
amatecha wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no intention of buying more at this point. The last was the iPhone 8 in 2017. No clue yet what I'll do in the future for a smartphone, because I don't see Android as an option at all. Hopefully this iPhone 8 lasts forever :)

Personally I find smartphones less and less useful. I use them mostly to stay in touch with people or to read articles online, and I do all my work from a laptop anyway. I used to buy flagship Android phones but I realized that it's wasted money. Now I have a 200€ Samsung phone, it works fine, yesterday it fell and the screen glass broke a bit, I couldn't care less. If I keep going at this rate, I think I will quit s…

Get a server or some hosting, load it with whatever you need - mail, web, cloudy things, media, communications etc - and use a portable terminal to access it when on the move. That portable terminal can be a phone with a browser or some future device which is more tailored to this type of application. With the current generation of SoC, Wasm and a capable browser (Firefox Nightly Preview is shaping up nicely) this setup is a viable replacement for most 'apps'. One of the advantages of such a setup is that those 'apps' do no get to track your every move - that is, as long as that capability is not built into the browser at some stage (persistent web workers etc).

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#878

Post by john_alan »

john_alan wrote: post #828
rurban wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called lockdown for a reason. Apple was just the very first to implement centralized binary blacklisting, revocation. They call it notarization. Problem is, that they did it unannounced. There must be really some weird stuff going on in those managers heads. How can they possibly think to go away with that?

Command line apps aren't affected by Notarization. If you're compiling something yourself, the compiler won't put a quarantine bit on it and it will execute fine. Same with homebrew/friends. Scripts don't need to be signed. There is something else going on here.

Seems that in fact even though scripts aren't signed, IF YOU DONT have devTooling enabled for a given terminal, scripts are hashed and checked against bad known digests.

not a big deal, assuming no data is kept.

Also I wonder what it looks like if a script is deemed bad...

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#879

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

maremp wrote: post #846
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He/she added an artificial network latency/delay into the config, just like they describe. That is the reason for the delay. It is made artificially long on purpose.

It’s not an unreasonable delay on a slow 3g hotspot. It’s problematic to have the performance tied to the network speed and suffer an overall slow performance because your network happens to be slow.

Have I written anything that is contradicts that? I simply pointed out that in the example the delay was artificial, and it was definitely due to network, not due to something other than network, as the comment suggested.

Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

#880

Post by beowulfey »

throwaway851 wrote: post #590
VonGuard wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, Apple. When you can no longer innovate, just start removing features and call it simplicity...

Another way to look at it is that Apple is making it harder to run the system in an insecure fashion. You may not agree with that decision, but I certainly appreciate how Apple is looking out for the safety and security of the user. Tangent: as much as some developers hate that the only way to distribute apps for the iPhone is through the App Store, as a user I consider that walled garden of apps to be a real securit…

I don’t really understand this argument. Apple has long been heralded for its safety and security. It’s why in three decades of owning macs we’ve never installed antivirus software.

What is the point of all this security these days? What are they protecting us from?

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