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Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2

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Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2

#101

Post by saagarjha »

lovelyviking wrote: post #97
davisr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 find it amazing that recently on a presumably ‘hacker’ forum opinions showing a ‘freedom software’ perspective get a bully response in form of simply downvoting and shutting up the person. I urge the admins to stop this practice. I wish to hear such points of view and consider things from such perspective. It is very logical to assume that once you have no direct access to the sources of software, that software cou…

Using Micro$oft at any point in your discussion is a great way to get people to not hear what you have to say.

Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2

#102

Post by saagarjha »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #96
nytgop77 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bug was in the design. (or in decision leading to design)

I don't think I'd call it a bug. It's a poor decision. I can easily believe that it wasn't a decision made with malicious intent; the culture at Apple seems (at least from the outside, judging by results) to encourage an "it's okay to give our own software special exceptions" mentality.

You could call it an entitled opinion.

Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2

#103

Post by saagarjha »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #80
aarchi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

You may find https://twitter.com/pvtmert/status/1339329302857457666 interesting

Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2

#104

Post by kitsunesoba »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #54
aarchi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still on Mojave to use 32-bit apps. Any way to use 32-bit in Catalina or later?

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

If I'm not mistaken, WINE is now capable of running 32-bit Windows binaries on 64-bit-only macOS as well, so that may also be an option particularly for more simple apps.

Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2

#106

Post by design-material »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #77
davisr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Wi…

Of course VSCode is proprietary malware - unless, as you suggest, you build it yourself and get rid of that proprietary telemetry malware (https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium)

But please don't suggest that we should praise Microsoft because they're decent enough to almost give us a somewhat convenient-if-you're-a-dev way to avoid being tracked?

Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2

#107

Post by cromka »

lovelyviking wrote: post #97
davisr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 find it amazing that recently on a presumably ‘hacker’ forum opinions showing a ‘freedom software’ perspective get a bully response in form of simply downvoting and shutting up the person. I urge the admins to stop this practice. I wish to hear such points of view and consider things from such perspective. It is very logical to assume that once you have no direct access to the sources of software, that software cou…

> On recent M1 you can’t even have own OS without Apple permission

That's not true. https://asahilinux.org/about/ , "Does Apple allow this? Don’t you need a jailbreak?"

Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2

#108

Post by jtbayly »

Demiurge wrote: post #100
colejohnson66 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps they wanted a bypass as system recovery option, or preference, not on by default.

That could really make sense of why you need a config file and it is just a simple bug at the same time.

Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2

#109

Post by jraph »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #77
davisr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Wi…

> I wasn't aware that VS Code was "proprietary malware"?

I'm sorry to see you are discovering this. VS Code is under this proprietary license [1]. As for the malware part:

> Data Collection. The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft. Microsoft may use this information to provide services and improve our products and services. You may opt-out of many of these scenarios, but not all, as described in the product documentation located at https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_how-to-di.... There may also be some features in the software that may enable you and Microsoft to collect data from users of your applications.

(emphasis mine).

Indeed you can rebuild your copy or get Codium without the telemetry under the MIT license, and the software is really good, but it is a crippled version and does not make VS Code free software.

(edit: it's not pure / pointless theory! I'm sure there is an agenda behind VS Code not being really free. I would not be surprised if more and more "convenient" or important features were released as proprietary, and they also control the extension center (the market place), which is one of the main reasons Theia [5] exists. Beware not to lock yourself down in this ecosystem too much.)

> 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

Microsoft is huge. The ratio between their proprietary code and the code that they open source is probably tiny. More importantly, they only release developer-related things, never things that target end users, except their telemetry-riddled Calculator [3].

> It is open source.[2] (ahem source available (sorry, FSF))

Hum. The reference for Open Source is the Open Source Initiative, not the FSF [2]. The FSF defines Free Software. These are almost equivalent things but still have two separate definitions.

Microsoft is not an open source software company. They just happen to be a huge software company and every huge software company open source a lot of code when it is strategic. I'm not judging, it's a fact. I'm happy to use some of their quality open source software targeted to the developer community like TypeScript, but an Open Source company would release their important code and be based on a business model around this.

And, no, we can't even really call Windows a source-available software. They share its source code to big entities so they can audit it, probably under NDA, and not everybody can access it. Actually you can find leaked code, but it is just this: leaked code. Mapbox-gl-js is a source-available software which is not open source (anymore) [4].

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/License/ [2] https://opensource.org/osd [3] https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/ [4] https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js [5] https://theia-ide.org/

Re: Apple removes first-party firewall exemption in macOS 11.2 beta 2

#110

Post by eyelidlessness »

shawnz wrote: post #86
eyelidlessness wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely doubt that was the motivation. See my kittycorner comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25771339

I don't think you are necessarily disagreeing with what they are saying. First of all, there are surely many people who influenced the creation and release of this feature and I don't think it would be accurate to assign a single motivation to all their work. Second, I don't think it's wrong to say that "boneheaded management cutting corners" by prioritizing the needs of other internal teams over the needs of the use…

> I don't think it's wrong to say that "boneheaded management cutting corners" by prioritizing the needs of other internal teams over the needs of the user is in some sense them "wanting to own your Mac". Although that is a dramatic way to describe it.

It’s beyond dramatic. It’s absurd. I’ve worked on so many projects and deadlines that have had to make such decisions, even decisions that eventually fell to me. In numerous cases I could cast aspersions on some of the management motivations, but even so I couldn’t describe it as them trying to own the product they’d sold to customers. In most cases it was a balance of market pressure and resources. In the cases where I’ve had to make those calls, it’s been balancing market pressure specifically so I had more room to satisfy users.

I don’t think Apple engineers are immune to this. They have to ship big things on a tight deadline. When they can’t satisfy everyone they have to make choices. Sometimes they don’t make the best choices.

Hopefully you don’t have these weights in your job. But lots of us do.

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