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Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

eclecticlight.co

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Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#81

Post by comex »

spijdar wrote: post #20
lapcat wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disable SIP

What sucks is that you can't disable SIP without _also_ disabling disk encryption ("FileVault"), because Apple changed from full disk encryption to only encrypting user data, and relying on SIP and crypto hashes to protect the system partition. Therefore, you can't "safely" disable SIP, as you'd be able to boot into recovery mode and perform an evil maid attack. This is really irritating, both that: - I can't "accept…

As far as I know, recovery mode doesn't let you do anything without either successfully authenticating or wiping the entire disk. An evil maid could theoretically compromise recovery mode at the login screen (with a USB device or something) but if they were able to do that, they could probably disable SSV themselves even if you hadn't done so. Therefore, disabling SSV shouldn't create additional risk involving recovery mode.

If the evil maid could boot macOS from an external disk, on the other hand, that would definitely be a problem. I think you need to authenticate in order to boot from an external disk for the first time (cf. [1]) but I'm not sure how this works.

[1] https://eclecticlight.co/2023/03/15/ownership-of-apple-silic...

Edit: Actually I guess an attacker trying to disable SSV themselves (via exploit of recovery mode) wouldn’t have the machine owner key needed to sign the new LocalPolicy. But could they reset it and still keep the data somehow? I don’t know.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#82

Post by gjsman-1000 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #69
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were possible, malware would shut down a mountain of services very quickly. Right off the bat, XProtect, MRT, Gatekeeper, amfid, system updates, telemetry, MDM...

sudo or equivalent has been around for quite a long time now.

You think regular people can be trusted with sudo? (Absolutely not.)

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#83

Post by timeon »

zackmorris wrote: post #58

With nobody at Apple handling the engineering problem of implementing user requests, we're stuck with what we got. So I highly recommend App Tamer by St. Clair Software (no affiliation), which lets you set how much CPU percentage each process can use: https://stclairsoft.com/AppTamer/index.html It does cost $14.95 USD, but it's given me my computer back for years now. I have Spotlight Indexer set to 10%, although I'm…

> we're stuck with what we got

I've been Apple fan for all those years but it is becoming harder and harder. M1 will be my first HW replaced before it stops working. Just because of software.

I'm already in process migrating to Linux.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#84

Post by array_key_first »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #82
mixmastamyk wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sudo or equivalent has been around for quite a long time now.

You think regular people can be trusted with sudo? (Absolutely not.)

Yes. It's their computer. We don't need to hand-hold grown adults, that's how we develop computer-illiteracy.

Nobody knows how to do anything because nobody lets them.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#85

Post by cindyllm »

array_key_first wrote: post #84
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think regular people can be trusted with sudo? (Absolutely not.)

Yes. It's their computer. We don't need to hand-hold grown adults, that's how we develop computer-illiteracy. Nobody knows how to do anything because nobody lets them.

[dead]

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#86

Post by hu3 »

layer8 wrote: post #67
CafeRacer wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Id disable half - if not more - of default services. Thats why my next laptop will be linux. Apple is not there yet, but kind of drifting towards becoming the new windows.

Windows at least lets you disable any service you want.

And I can tell Windows search to not index some directories. Like node_module with a million small files I don't want to search in anyway except with grep.

Perhaps if macs let you configure Spotlight to ignore some directories you could tell it to ignore the entire disk? Which would disable it in practical terms.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#87

Post by innagadadavida »

giantrobot wrote: post #60
analogpixel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Store your files in a file structure that makes sense so you know where things are? I have never used Spotlight to find a file because I put files in sensible places.

I use Spotlight all the time to search for the contents of files. I don't memorize the contents and names of every file on my system, that's what my computer is for.

Spotlight search relevancy is a complete joke. If only they did some embedding based search across the system and paid attention to basic precision recall numbers. This has gone from bad to worse quickly.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#88

Post by thisislife2 »

hu3 wrote: post #86
layer8 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows at least lets you disable any service you want.

And I can tell Windows search to not index some directories. Like node_module with a million small files I don't want to search in anyway except with grep. Perhaps if macs let you configure Spotlight to ignore some directories you could tell it to ignore the entire disk? Which would disable it in practical terms.

Not a fan of Spotlight here too. But, you certainly can instruct Spotlight to ignore some directory or drive through System Preferences > Spotlight and selecting the Privacy tab in it which allows you to add the directory or drive that you want Spotlight to not index.

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#89

Post by zapzupnz »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #62
jama211 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re very entitled to your opinion, but it should be fairly obvious why this isn’t reasonable from their perspective. Put another way, let’s just say I think apple is glad you’re not making decisions about how their operating system should work. It’s an OS built for users, not those who wish to have iron control over everything. Allowing that would be disastrous for most users just to appease the very small percent…

You had full root for more than a decade on any macOS machine.

And then you didn't. What's the purpose of saying this?

All consumer-operating systems also used to be single user with administrative access by default. Shall we return to that, too?

Re: Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

#90

Post by Retz4o4 »

ryandrake wrote: post #31
spijdar wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sucks is that you can't disable SIP without _also_ disabling disk encryption ("FileVault"), because Apple changed from full disk encryption to only encrypting user data, and relying on SIP and crypto hashes to protect the system partition. Therefore, you can't "safely" disable SIP, as you'd be able to boot into recovery mode and perform an evil maid attack. This is really irritating, both that: - I can't "accept…

I know the writing has been on the wall for a while but as a former fanboy, I just didn't see it. When SIP was released, it was my first "ah ha" wake-up call that Apple is no longer building software for me. Ten years later, it's still getting worse. This idea that the owner of the computer is not the ultimate authority over what is running on that computer is slowly seeping its way into macOS and with every release…

So on to Linux and RasberryPis?
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