macOS unable to open any non-Apple application • Hacker News Board

Re: macOS unable to open any non-Apple application

#891

Post by totalZero » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

floatingatoll wrote: post #355

tshaddox wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm puzzled that people are willing buy a computer/OS where (apparently) software can/will fail to launch if some central company server goes down. Maybe I'm just getting this wrong, because I can honestly not quite wrap my head around this. This is such a big no-go, from a systems design point of view. The answer is pretty simple: these problems are extremely rare, they don't last very long, and they tend to have…

The payoff for the very slight risk is an effective built-in malware prevention system that doesn’t treat me abusively and reacts in a timely manner to abusive circumstances. After decades of production operations, I have no complaints about how this was handled, and I expect they’ll investigate and patch any defects exposed by the outage. I went for a walk when this happened and when I got back it was fixed. Works f…

Normally I'm of a similar opinion to yours...but in this case I'm not.

What happens if you're trading securities, or if you have an imminent deadline? Apple sells a fail-closed security feature, without investing the resources necessary to keep it as near to 100% serviceable as possible, and never really discusses it with the user. When it hangs, most users don't even know why.

WTF!

Seems like they could partner with Akamai (or one of its competitors) to make the server-side component of this feature more robust.

If they are going to sell the MBP as a premium professional product, then they must recognize that it will sometimes serve as the linchpin of users' mission-critical activities.

Take a billion dollars out of the stock buyback, invest it in the product instead, and make this problem go away.

Re: macOS unable to open any non-Apple application

#892

Post by danilocesar » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

Apple has been deciding what and how you are allowed to run apps in your phone for almost a decade now. It's bad and all, but no one can say this is a surprise.

Re: macOS unable to open any non-Apple application

#893

Post by at_a_remove » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

I'll go a step further: what if someone decides, "Hey, I'll shut that website up by influencing someone to revoke their certificate."

Remember everyone's eagerness to eliminate bare, unencrypted HTTP? How self-signed certs are "sketchy?"

Has this been yet another way to pull the plug on certain parties? Could someone get Cloudflared by a maintainer of certs somewhere along the chain revoking a site's cert because they woke up in a bad mood?

Re: macOS unable to open any non-Apple application

#894

Post by rpastuszak » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

submeta wrote: post #2

Unbelievable. When I read the tweet (tried to post here as well), I suddenly realized why my Mac was unresponsive an hour ago. Here is another tweet that describes the problem in more detail: https://mobile.twitter.com/llanga/status/1326989724704268289 > I am currently unable to work because macOS sends hashes of every opened executable to some server of theirs and when `trustd` and `syspolicyd` are unable to do so,…

This might be a stupid question, but is there a downside to blocking this "feature"? I can't think of any.

I've been using Big Sur beta for some time and one of the things that annoyed me a bit was the sudden lack of responsiveness, which is a tad annoying given that I upgraded to a 16inch MBP earlier this year and everything felt so snappy.

Re: macOS unable to open any non-Apple application

#895

Post by jwif029jf209jf » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

mensetmanusman wrote: post #872

mav3rick wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God the self importance of this community. The world can live without the 1000 people here.

The interesting thing about this community is that technically it could create its own OS. That is a threat to nation state level institutes that want to prevent that.

> is that technically it could create its own OS

The vast majority of people here couldn't program a linked list given an hour and full access to the Internet.

Re: macOS unable to open any non-Apple application

#896

Post by behnamoh » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

brobdingnagians wrote: post #773

intricatedetail wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to say who is now Apple's target audience. It seems like their products are ideal for people who don't know much about IT and just want to watch a video or edit their holiday photos and maybe create a CV and will probably never go beyond that. Other people still enjoy Macs from 2012, but things are moving on when you look at desktop PC and what you can do. Apple looks more and more dumbed down.

It's like being trapped in a beautiful plastic cage. I used a MacBook Air (2012) for years as my primary development machine and really loved a lot about it, and it had some fantastic apps in the environment like QuickSilver, especially since it just worked compared to some of the Linux distros I had before that. But I'm glad I jumped ship when mine went obsolete.

>> It's like being trapped in a beautiful plastic cage.

To be fair, it's like being trapped in a silver gray aluminum cage with uniform body and irreplaceable bars. I wish more companies would make a PC laptop that doesn't suck aesthetically. Even when they use aluminum, most PC manufacturers don't spend much time on designing a good keyboard (arrow keys not having the same shape comes to mind.)

Re: macOS unable to open any non-Apple application

#897

Post by peternicky » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

strgcmc wrote: post #890

peternicky wrote: post #881

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank god I switched back to windows early this year. I absolutely love it and I do not foresee me returning to Apple for a considerable amount of time.

You should know that Windows includes a similar feature (to call home and report file hashes and the user's IP for example) called SmartScreen, and with default settings it also triggers on every single application launch in the OS. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SmartScreen#Windows (also I should know, I worked on a tiny part of this feature in IE9 and Windows 8)

Thanks for the reminder. I prefer that I can disable SmartScreen easily instead of making little snitch rules on macos.

Re: macOS unable to open any non-Apple application

#898

Post by mperham » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

fastball wrote: post #664

phkahler wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am currently unable to work because macOS sends hashes of every opened executable to some server of theirs and when `trustd` and `syspolicyd` are unable to do so, the entire operating system grinds to a halt. That's another case of a product not doing its primary function - OS running apps - because company placed their own (data gathering) objective above it. See thermostats not turning on heat when the internet…

Pretty sure Apple is doing this for security reasons, not data gathering reasons.

Correct, I believe the main intent is to stop worms and ransomware.

Re: macOS unable to open any non-Apple application

#899

Post by sgerenser » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

quantgenius wrote: post #870

areoform wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So yesterday I wrote about the blurring lines of ownership, and people came back with some fairly disparate responses. It's fair to say that I was mostly dismissed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25058952 And this is why I won't be moving to Apple silicon. Apple already has the ability to restrict whats apps I can run (they can simply toggle a switch for all users to "no unsigned binaries"), and congrats! Apple…

Get a Thinkpad. I replaced a 2015 MacBook Pro with a Thinkpad P1 Gen2 and love it. The trackpad isn’t as nice. The keyboard is better. Running WSL2 you have a great Unixy development environment in Windows. Or just install Linux. As thin and light as a MacBook Pro. Much better thermals, though still not awesome. Other, somewhat larger Thinkpads have better thermals. You can upgrade your RAM, add 2 SSDs and other peri…

I have that exact laptop (work provided) and I’m not a fan. Trackpad is OK but not nearly as good as my Mac. 4K display sometimes looks amazing but the color accuracy is terrible and there’s a weird speckle texture that I assume comes from the touch overlay. I have a thunderbolt dock that supplies 85w of power but the machine refuses to charge from it and requires connecting the huge external power supply. But the worst part is I’ve gone through several incidents where some update occurred (never could narrow it down to one in particular) and I started getting multiple blue screens a day.

Edit: forgot one more annoyance. The laptop seems to frequently power off completely overnight even though it should just be sleeping/hibernating.

Re: macOS unable to open any non-Apple application

#900

Post by trophycase » Fri, Nov 13, 2020, 5:39 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #600

pgt wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My policy is to never upgrade anything until everyone I know has upgraded to the next version and not downgraded after N weeks.

LOL, my policy is to never major-upgrade the OS the machine came with. I have machines around the house with OS'es going back a ways...

This is the correct policy. I upgraded my mac because I couldn't install a certain application on the version I was running and now it runs crazy hot and the fans run on full blast whenever I watch a video on the internet.