An Apple employee tweeted after the news with 11.0 that this was a bug so I'm not surprised, but happy to see it fixed!
Link?
Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2
71–80 of 354 posts
Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
For my 32 bit binaries, the easiest way to use them is to run the Windows version, because that OS has better backwards compatability. It's possible to get a Mojave VM up and running but it was nontrivial when I gave it a shot
I’m using a Mojave VM with VMWare Fusion on my laptop (that runs Catalina) on the rare occasion of needing to run 32bit apps. Install & setup was easy, without any problems. VMWare Fusion is a paid app, but VirtualBox should be able to do the same for free.
The latest Vmware Fusion has a free license for personal use.
Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
The firewall is just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft provides the sources and special builds for sensitive environments. They work with governments worldwide and open their source code to get certified. As far as I understand it never was Apple's priority.
You're commending Micro$oft for sharing source code? Please! They both are completely irresponsible and push proprietary malware. Anything less than freely usable/sharable software is inadequate.
I'm not in the business of commending or admonishing.
The question was whether Apple could/should be used in government classified/sensitive business environments.
Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
You make it sound so sinister, but yes of course Apple will use IPv6 if that’s the only (or best) route. That’s a good thing. Where does “constantly freezes” come from? You didn’t mention that in your linked post. And if your computer “constantly freezes” with Apple blackholed, why wouldn’t it also be constantly freezing when your network connection doesn’t reach the internet? I’m pretty sure they use an apple.com UR…
Why are they ignoring /etc/hosts if this is good behavior?
Are you also writing
:: domain.example
$ echo "0.0.0.0 cloudflare.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
$ getent hosts cloudflare.com && getent ahosts cloudflare.com
2606:4700::6810:85e5 cloudflare.com
0.0.0.0 STREAM cloudflare.comRe: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2
#75An Apple employee tweeted after the news with 11.0 that this was a bug so I'm not surprised, but happy to see it fixed!
Link?
There's no link because the tweet was deleted soon afterward. The tweet seems to have been very ill-advised.
I don't know how anyone can describe this as a "bug", because as the linked article describes, there's an explicit "ContentFilterExclusionList" in the Info.plist file with a list of the specific Apple services excluded. That's not by accident, it's by design.
Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be responsible of them if they had done it in a situation where they weren't pressured into the decision by media outlets.
As much the community wants to think they are evil and want to purposefully violate trust, most often the easier explanation works very well. Its an oversight or a resourcing issue.
As much as I'd like to believe it was just an oversight, how do you accidentally have your services bypass the firewall? That feels like it would have to be a deliberate choice under the assumption that "our apps are signed by us, and the OS verifies that, so all traffic through these apps should be OK, right?" I don't mean this snarkily; it's a genuine question. I don't know how OSes work.
Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
The firewall is just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft provides the sources and special builds for sensitive environments. They work with governments worldwide and open their source code to get certified. As far as I understand it never was Apple's priority.
You're commending Micro$oft for sharing source code? Please! They both are completely irresponsible and push proprietary malware. Anything less than freely usable/sharable software is inadequate.
I wasn't aware that VS Code was "proprietary malware"? All the code for that is right on GitHub.[0] If you don't trust the prebuilt ones, you're free to build it from the source yourself.
Want something else? Their GitHub repo list has almost 4000 repositories totaling 130 pages![1]
Just because the OS itself isn't open source[a] doesn't mean that Microsoft doesn't open source a whole crap ton of stuff. And sure, Window's telemetry can easily be construed as "malware", but Windows is not the entirety of Microsoft.
[a]: And that's a lie too (sortove). It is open source.[2] (ahem source available (sorry, FSF)) You just need a valid reason to look at it besides "I want to". Sidenote: I personally would hope that Windows gets open sourced, but I'm not holding my breath.
[0]: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode
[1]: https://github.com/microsoft
[2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/
P.S. Can we not use the "M$" moniker? It's almost childish. Just like "Crapple", "Microshit", etc, It serves no purpose.
Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be responsible of them if they had done it in a situation where they weren't pressured into the decision by media outlets.
Apple gives two fucks about media pressure. Their longstanding history of giving in to pressure almost exclusively is responsive to their users, either: - pro/dev users who act as their trend setters (see recent backpedals on keyboards and Mac Pro form factor) - people hacking stuff where it’s popular enough they want more influence on the UX (bootcamp)
Name an instance where Apple has reversed a decision where media outlets haven't reported on.
Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be responsible of them if they had done it in a situation where they weren't pressured into the decision by media outlets.
Its possible that they saw it as a purely positive move that would improve security on MacOS and then after seeing everyone's response they reevaluated its importance.
> positive move that would improve security
That they purposefully added in the first place to let only Apple apps bypass third-party firewalls?
Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2
#80very nice - this was one of my main contentions on Big Sur. Will upgrade once 11.2 is stable :)
I'm still on Mojave to use 32-bit apps. Any way to use 32-bit in Catalina or later?
No, and there never will be. It's not the execution of 32bit code that's the problem (you can trivially re-enable that with a kernel flag, if you want), but rather the removal of every 32bit library from the OS. Without those libraries, apps won't run.
You can sometimes get away with copying a handful of individual frameworks from older versions of macOS to newer ones, (I recently got Mountain Lion's QuickTime to work on Mavericks this way), but for so many libraries, many of which operate at a low level, it's just not going to happen!
Mojave is still a perfectly fine OS for a while longer. And you can of course use virtual machines, although personally I'd probably opt for dual booting if it really came to that.