Is this what happens when the Cold War spills out of internal tooling?
Bypassing Firewalls in macOS Big Sur
141–150 of 251 posts
Re: Bypassing Firewalls in macOS Big Sur
#142"If Microsoft had done something like this circa 1999, it would have been used as evidence in the antitrust suit."
Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the computing market. Microsoft basically did at that time.
Microsoft still does.
You can get a lot more done today without Microsoft than you could 20 years ago, but it is very hard to not have an accessible copy of Word if you interact with lawyers (where formatting and change tracking matters, and mostly compatible like libreoffice or google docs is not sufficient.
Also, if you take remote tests for school (which was almost mandatory for some, and now for almost all), many places require you install some windows only rootkit so they could claim to have monitored you.
My children’s remote school mostly works without any MS stuff, but every now and then it doesn’t and I have to fire up a VM.
Monopoly is still there, even if it is not as tight as it once was.
Re: Bypassing Firewalls in macOS Big Sur
#143This is a deal breaker for me. Little Snitch is absolutely 100% essential for privacy. I’m staying on MacOS Catalina until they pry it off my cold dead hands.
I'm still on Mojave and thinking about staying there.
Re: Bypassing Firewalls in macOS Big Sur
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
UNIX was a proprietary OS but literally everyone used it in the 80’s - without a license. Campuses to labs around the US. We need to nuke the Apple bullshit from MacOS Catalina and convert it into people’s operating system. Ethics be damned.
If only there were freely available, open source UNIX clones in the 21st century. Oh well!
Those clones have issues with multiple monitor setups and can’t run Photoshop.
Re: Bypassing Firewalls in macOS Big Sur
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I expect Apple to take the opposite path, not immediately, but eventually: disable sideloading and enforce a Mac App Store only policy on macOS, similar to iOS. After all, if all apps are reviewed and approved by Apple, there is no malware that can use this weakness or the future ones. And I am sure the 30% cut and $100 annual fee has nothing to do with the decision either. Apple only cares about customers, not money…
disable sideloading and enforce a Mac App Store only policy on macOS People have been repeating that for years, since the Mac App Store was announced. It’s not in Apple’s interest to do it. There is a ton of software, open source in particular, that Apple benefits tremendously by. It costs Apple nothing to maintain the status quo. Going Mac App Store only would drive tons of developers off the platform and do absolut…
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Re: Bypassing Firewalls in macOS Big Sur
#146Unpopular opinion follows. Apparently Patrick Wardle describes a security hole, which uses the NetworkExtension framework to make it as if his code is Apple code, and thus ignores the firewall rules. My guess is, that it'll get patched and that will be that. If you think about it, blocking OS stuff makes less sense. You're already trusting the OS to a great degree. (I can understand the need for most people to contro…
Absolutely not. You should be able to deny/allow connections for any app, including 1st party apps. This isn’t only an issue of trust. There are apps made to meter your connection (e.g. when you’re using your phone as a Personal Hotspot), where you’d like to see how much bw your 1st party apps are using, and have the option to block them.
Are there other ways to put a firewall (home user setup)? Kind of like Little Snitch but running on a separate device/broker/server?
Re: Bypassing Firewalls in macOS Big Sur
#147Unpopular opinion follows. Apparently Patrick Wardle describes a security hole, which uses the NetworkExtension framework to make it as if his code is Apple code, and thus ignores the firewall rules. My guess is, that it'll get patched and that will be that. If you think about it, blocking OS stuff makes less sense. You're already trusting the OS to a great degree. (I can understand the need for most people to contro…
Absolutely not. You should be able to deny/allow connections for any app, including 1st party apps. This isn’t only an issue of trust. There are apps made to meter your connection (e.g. when you’re using your phone as a Personal Hotspot), where you’d like to see how much bw your 1st party apps are using, and have the option to block them.
Personally, I fixed this by getting an unlimited mobile data subscription, which was only €20/month here in The Netherlands. But I understand that most people can't get that.
What does seem weird to me, is that they didn't implement a low data mode into macOS, like they do with iOS.
Re: Bypassing Firewalls in macOS Big Sur
#148How to disable this feature: https://tinyapps.org/blog/202010210700_whose_computer_is_it.... And a humorous guide on disabling protections like code signing and notarization: https://www.naut.ca/blog/2020/11/13/forbidden-commands-to-li...
The issue is defaults. Personally, I prefer using an open source alternative OS where generally everything is disbled by default. (NetBSD is best exemple I have found.) Commercial OS like the ones created by Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. have default settings that are opinionated, i.e., some users might not wish to choose these settings. This puts a burden on the user to disable or work around them somehow. Apple iOS and MacOS by default generate a considerable amount of network traffic to Apple servers as soon as they are powered on. When I power on a computer running NetBSD, there is by default no traffic to a corporate mothership.
Given the choice between (a) a corporate OS that requires me to perform some amount of work to "turn off" some "features" the corporation has enabled and (b) a non-corporate OS that requires me to perform some amount of work to "turn on" the "features" that I want to use, I prefer (b).
Re: Bypassing Firewalls in macOS Big Sur
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely not. You should be able to deny/allow connections for any app, including 1st party apps. This isn’t only an issue of trust. There are apps made to meter your connection (e.g. when you’re using your phone as a Personal Hotspot), where you’d like to see how much bw your 1st party apps are using, and have the option to block them.
Are there other ways to put a firewall (home user setup)? Kind of like Little Snitch but running on a separate device/broker/server?
Yes. Your router probably already has one.
Also i am wondering if you cant just change dns to block it either pihole, nextdns or even just change hosts file.
Re: Bypassing Firewalls in macOS Big Sur
#150This whole release cycle is just one gigantic facepalm after another. I am feeling pretty heavily smug that I got rid of my Apple kit earlier this year because I wasn't happy with the direction of the platform.
What did you move to?
Customize the hell out of Fedora. It is rock solid on most hardware. Once you get used to it, you won't want to use anything else.