Earlier quoted context omitted.
It absolutely is a cash grab, and part of a series of unethical behaviour from Apple. Since the latest awful hardware products (terrible keyboard, control strip thing that breaks, no escape key) with MacBooks and a great improvement with using Linux via Purism and System76 I've managed to move away from Apple.
> great improvement with using Linux via Purism and System76 I look forward to the day when I can afford a System76 laptop.
Can't you just right click?
151–160 of 765 posts
Re: Can't you just right click?
#152Moral of the story is, if you want to protect your users, you have to bring some level of inconvenience and frustration to them. Or be sure that I will run that malware no matter what you say.
[1] https://forum.transmissionbt.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=17834
Re: Can't you just right click?
#153Re: Can't you just right click?
#154This feature is at about the right spot for me. It is still convenient enough for me to run software I want that isn't signed, but sufficiently obtuse that neither of my parents have figured it out. Given they are both prone to running any executable that any website tells them to download and run, this feature has probably save me several dozen hours of fixing their computers.
Apple has been making things more and more restrictive over a decade now. New versions of mac os introducing new restrictions. Doesn't take a genius to see that their end goal is to make mac os as restrictive as ios. When that happens, will it still be the right spot for you?
Apple moved their focus from the professional market who were willing to pay premium for productivity with better UX/Hardware/Software, to people paying just the premium .
It is a lifestyle brand now, people money because it is Apple, not because there is real value they gain for the higher cost.
Depending on what you work with, Windows or Linux is by far better option today. MS listens to developers (eventually), WSL , professional support, a lot of graphical professional grade applications all make it attractive. Linux is lot more flexible, works with less friction makes it easy to work with containers servers etc,
If you really need Apple hardware dual boot or flash a sensible OS .
Re: Can't you just right click?
#155This makes me wonder how open source is supposed to work on macOS. People seem to become more and more aware of it and even enterprises that insisted on support contracts can see that they can't get around open source completely anymore. Meanwhile Apple is removing the ability for me to have a pet project without paying an Apple tax. If the message were completely transparent, something like "The developer didn't pay…
"Here are the sources, here are the binaries, here you subscribe to get access to signed binaries that run without the scare quotes"
Re: Can't you just right click?
#156I dont see any problem with this. If you don't feel comfortable doing this then you definitely shouldn't be running random code from the internet. I would take it a step further and force it to be run from the command line. Also, what kind of "viable software business" has trouble paying $100 a year?
Whether or not this is a good thing for most users is certainly arguable, but it still doesn't sit right that you have to pay Apple and get their permission to distribute macOS software that isn't presented to the user as likely malware.
Re: Can't you just right click?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many (often cross-platform) apps are no longer signed, so they throw up this warning–I assume that users of these have long since learned that the warning is just something they need to bypass. macOS-native apps have largely adopted notarization and the fee that comes with it. Open source command line tools do not need to be notarized. Interestingly enough, it seems to be possible to notarize someone else's app , so…
> learned that the warning is just something they need to bypass Note that I'm not necessarily arguing that training people to click "yes, yes, continue..." is a good idea. Digital security is my day job and I totally see why Apple wants digital signatures for software. However, the message is opaque about what is really going on and just tries to scare people into buying "trusted" software rather than using free sof…
I don't think so, the concern would be revokation, if someone does a bad thing and Apple pulls the cert your entire friends would lose access.
I wonder if it would make sense to do ring-based instead (r0 being most trusted)
Re: Can't you just right click?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as there's software there will be devs who need machines with which they can build it. Those machines will always need mechanisms for circumventing safety constraints, almost by definition. I guess it's possible Apple could decide, one day, "macOS isn't for developers anymore, it's just like iOS, devs will just have to go elsewhere". But that seems like it would be a profoundly stupid thing to do. I do wish t…
Look at iOS, you need to pay for a developer account and the signed applications can't be distributed (otherwise they'll revoke your account) and have short-lived certs.
Re: Can't you just right click?
#159The fact that the standard model of computing is that applications are opaque machine code blobs that can access everything in your user permission space is the core problem in privacy and malware. Applications should see nothing but their executable jail, and whatever was intentionally allowed to them by the user (eg, Open file dialog giving the application an opaque file handle, etc, not carte blanche access to the…
> Applications should see nothing but their executable jail, and whatever was intentionally allowed to them by the user Whilst this works for some programs, it gets... Difficult... When dealing with others. What permissions should sh get, for example? And do the programs it will call inherit the same, or do they get their own permissions, or a hybrid?
The permission model works pretty similar here to a restricted user account. It sees system files as read-only, cannot see the contents of certain files and directories, etc. The root of the filesystem might be of the parent system or of the sandbox itself.
On macOS, reading certain directories (like the user's Desktop) will result in a user consent prompt due the sensitive contents. There is, after all, no guarantee that the request was directly initiated by the user, and not some curl-pipe shell script. There is however a "Developer Tools" entitlement that encompasses all of these sorts of prompts - but this is meant to be enabled through a developer action and not any user-presented prompt.
On macOS, there are basically higher-than-root system integrity protections, such as modifying files that the OS maintains. You can disable this system protection by booting into recovery mode and running a command-line tool.
Generally, the goal with system integrity protection is not to restrict professional work but to restrict the ability to publish software that tells the user to disable system-wide protections. There was recently an issue with the Google installer where a Chrome update wiped out part of the system when these protections were disabled, primarily noticed on hackintoshes and video production Macs where tools require SPI to be disabled to run unsigned kernel extensions, etc. Oops.
Apple has been trying to reduce the need across macOS releases to have applications need to be installed at all, with recent releases making items like browser, system, and kernel extensions bundled inside the application itself rather than being distributed across the filesystem. The goal is likely to eliminate app installation on macOS from needing to be a privileged operation.
Re: Can't you just right click?
#160A couple other ways to deal with it (at least for some instances--not sure this applies to every kind of executable). 1.1 Hit "Cancel" in the warning dialog. 1.2 Open "System Preferences" / "Security & Privacy" and select the "General" tab. 1.3 It should have a notice about the unverified app being blocked, and offer the chance to approve it. Do so. 1.4 Try to launch the app again. You'll get the dialog again, but th…
This is so far beyond reasonable from a ux standpoint and they have no reason to improve because what am I going to do? Not use macos to work on iOS stuff? It pisses me off so much