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Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

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Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#191

Post by KingMachiavelli »

mondoshawan wrote: post #145
rthomas6 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android is open source.

What is your point? This kind of response completely ignores the fact that the vast majority of the drivers required to just run on modern hardware are closed source and that the vast majority of phones these days have their bootloaders locked.

> that the vast majority of phones these days have their bootloaders locked.

I don't know if that is actually still true. Back in the day nearly every phone in the US was bootloader and carrier locked. Now basically every phone is carrier unlocked and anything besides Samsung can have the bootloader unlocked very easily. I guess Samsung phones are the most common but there are certainly many other options that are more open.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#192

Post by The_Colonel »

userbinator wrote: post #174
The_Colonel wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'm not an expert, but isn't it still simply pirating software? I mean what's the difference between this and pirating Photoshop for example?

Adobe sells Photoshop, Apple does not sell macOS (and freely publishes download links for the latter.)

Apple does sell macOS (as a part of MacBook, iMac etc).

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#193

Post by igetspam »

I'm going to bookmark this reply as an example of how to take feedback and respond appropriately. Jason's explanations both take responsibility for the issues at hand and provide adequate information to understand the difficulty in resolving them. He takes responsibility for a failure in review, which is a common problem I see in engineering orgs. I'm not an Apple user but I have a lot of love for the wireguard project (our company has donated) and the commitment shown here makes me confident that my feelings are not misplaced.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#194

Post by igetspam »

fxtentacle wrote: post #59
tasn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users demand it. You can't have a popular VPN app without Apple support (because at least one person in the org will have an iDevice), so you have to do it. I made another comment in this thread about my experience building EteSync. That's one of the more annoying parts about Apple being the gatekeeper to 40% of the US population (and in effect, to 100% of businesses). As a developer, you are just stuck with no way o…

Oh you absolutely can. You'll lose 40% of your users, but for a free project, that shouldn't matter much.

You'll lose more than that. If there wasn't a viable Apple solution, half my dev team wouldn't be able to use it, so 100% of my org wouldn't be able to use it because I can't maintain half a solution. You'd be left only with tinkerers. I'd say you'd have lost about 95%.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#195

Post by nuker »

vetinari wrote: post #181
nuker wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not only is it much faster other VPNs IPSec is as fast as Wireguard. And there is native client in MacOS. As for bloated codebase, there is an OpenBSD iked rewrite.

With IPSec native client in MacOS, there are several problems: - multiple users on the same machine cannot have their own credentials for the same tunnel; you have to create several tunnels and each user sees all of them. Obviously, you cannot save password then. - if you want to setup routing for your L2TP split-tunel, you have to create bash scripts (ip-up, ip-down) in /etc/ppp. Not even Linux makes you to do this…

Why L2TP and not IKEv2?

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#196

Post by danShumway »

webmobdev wrote: post #109
hiq wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That sort of suggests another question, though: why are we in the App Store at all? Because as far as I know, Apple only allows NetworkExtension-based apps to be distributed via the App Store, according to their developer relations guy [6], so we're locked in. And even if they were to change that someday somehow, and we went to standalone distribution, we would then have to support two parallel distribution channel…

They should abandon the app store.

> Because as far as I know, Apple only allows NetworkExtension-based apps to be distributed via the App Store, according to their developer relations guy [6], so we're locked in.

They can't.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#197

Post by igetspam »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #87
nuker wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not only is it much faster other VPNs IPSec is as fast as Wireguard. And there is native client in MacOS. As for bloated codebase, there is an OpenBSD iked rewrite.

iirc, ipsec is considered somewhat of a security nightmare by modern standards, given that it difficult to fully understand and very easy to misconfigure in an insecure way. I would only recommend using ipsec over wireguard when legacy compat matters.

It is. Even the companies I integrate with that require it know it's full of pitfalls. When you've been doing ipsec for two decades and it's a checkbox in your compliance sheet though, you check the box and hopefully you're good at it by now.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#198

Post by jaywalk »

viraptor wrote: post #95
SSLy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because something is unauthorized or breaks EULA (mostly void here in EU anyway) doesn't mean it's illegal.

Even if you don't expect EULA to be enforced (will you pay for my lawyers/fine if it is?), you still need a copy of the system which you can't buy directly. You're left with unauthorised copies if you don't have any MacOS hardware and the same question - would you cover my legal costs?

You can download MacOS directly from Apple for free.

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#199

Post by sonotmyname »

> Because as far as I know, Apple only allows NetworkExtension-based apps to be distributed via the App Store,

No, not so. Plenty of VPN apps based on network extensions are delivered outside the Mac App Store. In fact, most commercial VPNs are done this way. My company uses GlobalProtect for example, and I can install it any number of ways, and it’s been NE based for over a year now...

Re: Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”

#200

Post by wlesieutre »

_ea1k wrote: post #190
scaladev wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now. When they change that optional setting they introduced recently which blocks sideloading applications outside of the official store and make it non-optional, what are we going to do? Use special Chinese Android builds with Ali store (or whatever it's called)? Boiling the frog slowly and all.

> When they change that optional setting they introduced recently What setting was introduced recently? I remember such settings all the way back to the Nexus One. In fact, things were more closed back then as Android phones bought from AT&T had it hard coded to disable third party apps. I'm not aware of a US carrier doing that any more.

Might be talking about their "Advanced Protection Program": https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/
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