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macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

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Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#361

Post by ashtonkem »

wongarsu wrote: post #291
colejohnson66 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m actually curious what’s wrong about it? I read it from an outsider perspective and it’s full of very convincing arguments against “blockchains.” You’re absolutely correct that he’s writing from his understanding, but Schneider’s been in the field for decades (more than many Bitcoin proponents are old ), so I’m more inclined to believe he knows what he’s talking about than some other random person on the internet.

I think the main reason for the dissonance is that Schneier talks about the trust that happens (and maybe has to happen in real-world scenarios) while the bitcoin community likes to talk about the minimum amount of trust necessary. You don't have to trust the software, you can verify it or implement your own. You don't have to trust your internet uplink, the protocol would work over carrier pigeons or with dead drops…

> You don't have to trust the software, you can verify it or implement your own.

This is a common refrain among software people, but in reality approximately 0% of the market actually rewrites such software on their own. Most people can't code, and the percentage of those who have the time, interest, and specialized programming skills to rewrite their own financial software is an incredibly tiny pool. In practice, you have to trust someone's code.

And auditing doesn't get you very far either. That takes time too, and auditing secure software is really hard. I doubt I could do it, personally.

> You don't have to trust your internet uplink, the protocol would work over carrier pigeons or with dead drops.

Be serious. Nobody does this, aside from maybe as a joke.

> You don't have to trust exchanges, just exchange bitcoin for local currency with your neighbor.

You don't have to, yet everyone seems to. Convenience matters, pretending to the contrary is a fool's game.

> And even if you use an exchange you shouldn't store money there anyways.

Crypto fans say this all the damn time, and yet nobody seems to listen. Maybe because it's foolish advice to give? While this advice is technically strong, it fundamentally fails to understand what people using any financial system want and what motivates them. Nobody wants to turn the process of moving money around into an elaborate song and dance; they want to click a few buttons and have it work. If your system counts on either telling people to avoid the most convenient option to accomplish the task, your advice will continually fail.

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#362

Post by kstrauser »

nickodell wrote: post #358
kstrauser wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you have a shared office DNS resolver (which is pretty common). That resolver would aggregate all of the requests into one shared, cached stream. Then the question becomes "hey Apple, one person of how ever many thousand are behind me would like to know if Adobe's certificate is still valid". That's reasonably anonymized, I think.

Then the question is, "how much do I trust my ISP/DNS provider?" Those DNS lookups tell your ISP 1) that you use a mac and 2) that you have an application from a specific developer installed. I think I trust my ISP less than I trust Apple, here. Am I wrong to do so?

Well, back to the state right now where your ISP can see your plaintext HTTP packets if they want to, so it wouldn't be any worse than the current situation. I guess you could get much the same effect by configuring your company Macs to point at a shared Squid server to cache the GET requests from the OCSP server, but in practice almost no one does that.

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#363

Post by zapzupnz »

dkonofalski wrote: post #340
exoji2e wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well even if Epic are the bad guys by violating the ToU willingly, it still impacts the user. As a user I don't want my apps (which I depend on) to stop working, because of a business disagreement. Revoking signatures and disabling the apps on user devices to protect your business model is definitely anti-consumer in my book. You could easily see Apple revoking signatures because of DMCA claims. Even faulty ones, lik…

Of course it impacts the user... And if Epic was found doing something illegal and was shut down or bankrupted, that would also impact the user. Your over-simplification that it's a "business disagreement" is disingenuous and incomplete. The signature revocation system you're claiming is simply to "protect their business model" is the same system that allows Apple to immediately shut down any malware that makes its w…

> The only anti-consumer behavior in your situation came from Epic who knowingly violated the rules as a PR stunt.

Exactly. Never forget, it was Epic who threw their users under the bus, not Apple.

Epic expected you to be a soldier in their fight. They expected you to make a sacrifice you were not willing to make.

That's entirely on Epic.

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#364

Post by reificator »

ashtonkem wrote: post #361
wongarsu wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main reason for the dissonance is that Schneier talks about the trust that happens (and maybe has to happen in real-world scenarios) while the bitcoin community likes to talk about the minimum amount of trust necessary. You don't have to trust the software, you can verify it or implement your own. You don't have to trust your internet uplink, the protocol would work over carrier pigeons or with dead drops…

> You don't have to trust the software, you can verify it or implement your own. This is a common refrain among software people, but in reality approximately 0% of the market actually rewrites such software on their own. Most people can't code, and the percentage of those who have the time, interest, and specialized programming skills to rewrite their own financial software is an incredibly tiny pool. In practice, yo…

I just want to check to see if you read the GP all the way through to the final sentence. You're tearing it apart piece by piece as though the author was making those claims, but you neglected to quote the part of the post that revealed their true opinion.

> The minimum required trust is tiny (basically you yourself), but of course as Schneier points out the amount of trust involved in practise isn't nearly as low, and for many people the failure cases are much worse

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#365

Post by alwillis »

ashtonkem wrote: post #360
alwillis wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re going to claim Schneier is wrong on crypto stuff, you’ll want to bring a suitcase of evidence along… How about $348 billion dollars that says he's wrong about his take on Bitcoin? Look, I get it. I respect Schneier's knowledge on encryption but he is wrong about blockchains and about Bitcoin in particular. But he wouldn't be the first establishment technologist/economist/politician to be wrong about Bitcoin…

> How about $348 billion dollars that says he's wrong about his take on Bitcoin? Market bubbles are a thing. For a while there everyone was convinced that small plush toys were going to help them retire. The market also convinced itself for nearly a decade that "housing prices never go down". Lots of people can be wrong for a surprisingly long time.

Market bubbles are a thing. For a while there everyone was convinced that small plush toys were going to help them retire.

Yes, bubbles are a thing, but Bitcoin appears to be something different. It's passed ever test and attack. It's now being taken seriously by mainstream financial professionals, CEOs of publicly traded companies and Wall Street.

These facts themselves can't prove that Bitcoin is not a bubble but it does mean if you buy into that line of thinking, then encryption and math have to be suspect as well, since Bitcoin's functioning relies on them.

Also, Bitcoin has been the best performing asset of the past 10 years in which most people didn't take it seriously: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-31/bitcoin-s...

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#366

Post by sneak »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #176

It kind of feels like there's a bit too much noise around this topic. I'm getting the same feeling I did years ago when it was discovered that the iPhone had a historical database of all the locations you'd been to. There were rather a lot of articles about how Apple were "tracking you everywhere you went" and so on. The reason it's similar – they are both dumb, technically bad, and privacy-compromising decisions, an…

I think people who have this viewpoint are largely ignorant of the amount of tracking data that comes out of a mac or iphone, even in first party apps, that you cannot turn off at all.

This is not an isolated incident, and their own OS services are explicitly whitelisted to bypass firewalls and VPNs in Big Sur.

There’s telemetry in most Apple apps, now, and you can’t disable it or opt out, or even block or VPN it in some cases. I encourage you to read their disclosures when you first launch Maps or TV or App Store. Every keystroke in the systemwide search box hits the network by default, too.

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#367

Post by kelnos »

spurgu wrote: post #341
wongarsu wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main reason for the dissonance is that Schneier talks about the trust that happens (and maybe has to happen in real-world scenarios) while the bitcoin community likes to talk about the minimum amount of trust necessary. You don't have to trust the software, you can verify it or implement your own. You don't have to trust your internet uplink, the protocol would work over carrier pigeons or with dead drops…

This is pretty much how I interpret it as well, in regards to trust. One detail Schneier misses though is: > Honestly, cryptocurrencies are useless. They’re only used by speculators looking for quick riches, people who don’t like government-backed currencies, and criminals who want a black-market way to exchange money. The second statement contradicts the first. People who don't like/trust government-backed currencie…

This just feels like moving the goalposts, though. Bitcoin has been pushed as this revolutionary thing that's going to fundamentally change currency and payments for everyday people. It hasn't. It likely won't. Maybe some other blockchain-based currency will at some point, but I'm skeptical of that claim.

Beyond that, Bitcoin as a simple store of value is an incredibly risky proposition. Someone upthread posted a link to an article claiming that Bitcoin has been the best performing asset over the last 10 years, but that ignores the gut-wrenching volatility it's gone through.

And even if you stretch to suggest that Bitcoin has been a good investment, a good investment vehicle is generally not a great currency. If I had a $100 bill that, a week later, was worth $50, I'd be pissed. If another week later it was worth $200, I'd be pleased, but would feel very uncomfortable thinking I can rely on that "currency" to continue to pay my bills over the long term.

I'm not saying Bitcoin has failed or that it's useless in general, but as a generic currency replacement I'd say it's pretty weak and unreliable, mainly only suitable for use by people at the margins, people who often can't bear the risk that Bitcoin foists upon them.

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#368

Post by kelnos »

ogre_codes wrote: post #283
nullc wrote: post #2

A common refrain in arguments that we don't need laws to protect privacy is that the market will take care of it. The market can't act against what it can't see. Privacy loss is often irreversible. A common refrain in arguments that we don't need to reject closed source software to protect privacy is that being closed source doesn't hide the behaviour, and people will still notice backdoors and privacy leaks. Sometim…

> A common refrain in arguments that we don't need laws to protect privacy is that the market will take care of it. Stronger privacy laws hurt Google, Facebook, and Amazon far more than Apple. Most of Apple's privacy gaffs are just bonehead moves like this one which shouldn't happen, but also don't drive revenue.

I don't look at it that way. I think privacy is secondary to Apple, and that they use privacy as a selling point when it suits them. Their overall goal is tight control over the entire computing experience, and in places where that degrades privacy, so be it.

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#369

Post by kelnos »

Spooky23 wrote: post #179
nullc wrote: post #2

A common refrain in arguments that we don't need laws to protect privacy is that the market will take care of it. The market can't act against what it can't see. Privacy loss is often irreversible. A common refrain in arguments that we don't need to reject closed source software to protect privacy is that being closed source doesn't hide the behaviour, and people will still notice backdoors and privacy leaks. Sometim…

This isn’t that. I’ve been aware of this for some time, pretty sure it was in the security white paper and talked about as a feature. People forget about CRLs because browsers mostly ignore them. People just go crazy for any Apple story because it attracts attention. People have been paying to send all sorts of app launch analytics to AV companies for example since the 90s.

> I’ve been aware of this for some time, pretty sure it was in the security white paper and talked about as a feature.

That doesn't invalidate what the parent said. The only way awareness helps is if it's general knowledge. I don't believe it was, and you personally having known about it doesn't make it so.

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#370

Post by kelnos »

samatman wrote: post #281
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lying to the customer about what your product does, or having secret functionality, should be a criminal offence in the same way as breaking and entering or stalking are. Then, we would find out very quickly what people value. I firmly believe this ecosystem (as in privacy violating ad and data selling business model) is only dominant because companies are able to mislead with impunity, so it's basically a form of fr…

I agree with this, to some degree. But I've also known that macOS verifies signatures for as long as it's been doing it. This was no secret, it was advertised as a feature . I assumed it wasn't being done in plaintext, because who would be so foolish as to code it that way? and I'm still plenty mad about that. Anyone could have checked this at any time, presumably people did, and the only reason it became a story is…

Was it widely known that this feature was implemented as a privacy-leaking phone-home feature? Simply saying "macOS verifies application signatures before running them" doesn't necessarily imply that it's shipping execution data to Apple. All of that can happen offline, if Apple had chosen to implement it that way.
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