The usual arguments I hear for this is grandma or kid following these specific instructions and installing a malware. But how many attacks make use of these?
macOS Sequoia makes it harder to run not notarized or signed apps
51–60 of 76 posts
Re: macOS Sequoia makes it harder to run not notarized or signed apps
#52The amount of Mac development has cratered in recent years. No money to be made compared to iOS.
Re: macOS Sequoia makes it harder to run not notarized or signed apps
#53> The only people who knew about the Control-click shortcut were ones who probably understood the risks they were taking. Or users who were told to "control click" by malicious sites peddling trojan horses and other stuff, so that they never see a warning
> so that they never see a warning
Untrue. You always see a warning: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/unsigned.html
Re: macOS Sequoia makes it harder to run not notarized or signed apps
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
hopefully xattr -d com.apple.quarantine will keep working.
I've had some apps refuse to run until I acknowledged their signer in the Security & Privacy section of System Preferences even though the quarantine bit was not set, unfortunately.
Did the app include a system or kernel extension? Because I'm pretty sure these always require Security & Privacy authorization even when unquarantined, signed, and notarized.
Re: macOS Sequoia makes it harder to run not notarized or signed apps
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had some apps refuse to run until I acknowledged their signer in the Security & Privacy section of System Preferences even though the quarantine bit was not set, unfortunately.
Did the app include a system or kernel extension? Because I'm pretty sure these always require Security & Privacy authorization even when unquarantined, signed, and notarized.
The two that I saw this were OrbStack and Podman Desktop, when their signatures were replaced (I think to ensure that their trampoline (launcher shim) apps could have the same signatures as the real apps).
Maybe apps that use Apple's virtualization APIs qualify here?
Here's the context of that experiment, after which I went back to installing those apps via brew and using them without such modifications: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126387
Re: macOS Sequoia makes it harder to run not notarized or signed apps
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s worth keeping in mind that in the case of Apple platforms, a lot of this has roots in the revelation a decade and change ago that third party software on mobile platforms can and will exploit every affordance the operating system offers to extract data, often silently. It’s no different on desktop OSes, but users have been more acclimated to it there since full blown access to everything has been the norm there…
> It’s no different on desktop OSes, but users have been more acclimated to it there since full blown access to everything has been the norm there longer than it hasn’t. This is a problem with proprietary software markets in particular. You can largely escape this dilemma if you source your software from a free software distribution like a Linux distro, Conda, Pkgsrc, F-Droid, etc., because they have their own proces…
Most people would not have an easy time completely eliminating proprietary software from day to day usage. Reducing the amount of it is certainly possible (though may come with caveats WRT ease of use/UX; F-droid for example is not fun to try to comb through to find the good bits), but some amount is going to linger even if it’s just games the user plays to blow off some steam at the end of the day.
Even if full-FOSS were practical, I’d still want robust sandboxing and permissions to help limit the blast radius if some malicious executable manages to find its way in and to feel confident that nothing is poking around where it shouldn’t be. There’s not really a good reason for everything to have access to everything except for convenience.
Re: macOS Sequoia makes it harder to run not notarized or signed apps
#57It also adds a new permission prompt for screenshot and screen recording apps that doesn’t allow a user to permanently grant permission, but requires a weekly re-authorization. https://9to5mac.com/2024/08/06/macos-sequoia-screen-recordin...
They have a similar prompt for accessibility (I believe) API in the beta, and it completely breaks Chrome Remote Desktop.
Re: macOS Sequoia makes it harder to run not notarized or signed apps
#58Yes, make macOS more and more like iPadOS so their users can do less and less other than buying apps from the app store and scrolling through the slop on Safari. Apple kinda reminds me of Intel in the 2010's ( not 1-1 comparison ), hollowed and rotting inside but in a constant party because $$ coming in and line going up.. They wrongly think because they control the dials when things start to go south they can just s…
> Yes, make macOS more and more like iPadOS so their users can do less and less other than buying apps from the app store and scrolling through the slop on Safari. This doesn't seem at all a fair characterization of what happened here - you can still run these applications, they just added a (seemingly pretty reasonable) step to do so. I don't see this as allowing users to do less, and I struggle to find a strong arg…
Protecting users against malware should be the job of XProtect. If a naive user can run malware via right-clicking, they can do it nearly as easily through the Privacy & Security page. All this change does is bring unsigned software closer to outright deprecation, at which point Apple can backdoor app review through notarization just like they do on iOS in the EU.
Re: macOS Sequoia makes it harder to run not notarized or signed apps
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yes, make macOS more and more like iPadOS so their users can do less and less other than buying apps from the app store and scrolling through the slop on Safari. This doesn't seem at all a fair characterization of what happened here - you can still run these applications, they just added a (seemingly pretty reasonable) step to do so. I don't see this as allowing users to do less, and I struggle to find a strong arg…
Protecting users against malware should be the job of XProtect. If a naive user can run malware via right-clicking, they can do it nearly as easily through the Privacy & Security page. All this change does is bring unsigned software closer to outright deprecation, at which point Apple can backdoor app review through notarization just like they do on iOS in the EU.
I’m probably viewing this too much in the lens of an IT administrator, I absolutely do not want any of my machines to run unsigned applications and I can’t think of any reasons I personally would want to, so for me, that friction is a good thing.
As to what Apple may eventually do, just seems a little speculative.