This seems like a natural outflow of a company design process that
(a) prioritizes security highly
(b) prioritizes regular users over developers
(c) does not allocate sufficient resources to the product to thoroughly cover all the bases
(d) is developed by people in North America, for whom the USA === the whole world, and are used to near 100% seamless internet connectivity with latency I love macOS, but their software generally has issues with flakey internet connectivity and long latencies - down here in South Africa, ~400ms RTT is not uncommon.
MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?
911–920 of 1001 posts
Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?
#912It seems like there is a lot of confusion here as to whether this is real or not. I've been able to confirm the behavior in the post by: - Using a new, random executable. Even echo $rand_int will work. Edit: What I mean here is generate your rand int beforehand and statically include it in your script. - Using a fresh filename too. Just throw a rand int at the end there. e.g. /tmp/test4329.sh I MITMd myself while rec…
I'm surprised nobody mentioned that Windows Defender does something very similar (checking for never-seen-before binaries at runtime, uploading them to Microsoft servers, then running them there) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21180019
Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?
#913Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMHO the original choice of the path seems incredibly ill-advised and the main burden lies with the original developers. sometimes old errors and mistakes come back and bite
I second this. Any tool which creates its own directory in the filesystem root (and cannot run from any other location) is inherently doing it wrong by any measure.
By your own words, tool like apt, yum, and pacman would all be "doing it wrong." It's just wrong to blindly apply any rules without considering the various presumptions that justifies it. Specifically, the general advice of not creating directories in the filesystem root mainly applies to individual packages and is inadequate for system-level package managers.
Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?
#914Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what "Developer Tools" grants in practice. Clicking the (?) for viewing built-in help does not mention this particular setting, it skips right over it going from "Automation" above it to "Advertising" below it.
I believe it means the process will no longer check for the Quarantine xattr.
But the quarantine xattr has nothing to do with checking notarization?
Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?
#915Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is identical, and if I considered my phone to be primarily a research platform I'd be really upset. I got really upset with YouTube mucking around curating what videos they allow on their platform because I want to choose my own videos. But ultimately I own an iPhone because I need a GPS map, SIM card and web browser on the go. Apple doesn't exercise any creative control over those things. Apart from that they exp…
If someone used that walled garden approach on my PC I'd be furious. As this article shows, Apple is slowly moving in that direction for their PCs. They aren't going to be satisfied with locking down their phones only.
Are they really moving in that direction, though?
An App Store from which you can download software with confidence is a pretty sensible first step for most users.
Complementing that with a Notarization service for apps that can't live in the App Store, while still giving both users and developers confidence that the user is installing the "real" app, and not something malicious, seems like a pretty sensible way to protect most users outside the App Store.
And if all else fails, there are ways to allow running that un-Notarized, non-App Store app that you're sure you trust.
None of that seems like something that inherently means to take away your ability to run what you want on your PC, it just sounds like a common sense approach to giving your users confidence in what they run, and guiding them to do so safely by default, while allowing overrides as needed.
Are these ALSO things that Apple could use to lock down your PC completely?
Sure... but then, why bother with any of it if that was the intent?
They already have Mac App Store, and they already have the infrastructure to deal with a "whitelist only" approach, so why bother with this Notarization and Gatekeeper stuff at all?
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of room to criticize Apple for their implementation. They are clearly figuring out some of this as they go, and trying to find a proper balance. That isn't easy, despite how many people make it out like it is.
Give the average user too many prompts or chances to override security, and they will do that, every time, without thinking it through.
On the other hand, bury the overrides too deeply, and risk making things miserable for the developers and power users who need to use your platform freely.
So far, I see only evidence that Apple is trying to find that balance, but no evidence that they intend to lock the entire platform down entirely.
Are they doing it perfectly? Clearly not. But I think if we're being honest, no other platform has either. I appreciate Apple's approach the most so far, but time will tell if they are able to figure this balance out or if another platform will at some point.
Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?
#916Earlier quoted context omitted.
Developers who use macOS as shiny GNU/Linux replacement are only getting what they deserve, they should have supported Linux OEMs to start with. Those that show up at FOSDEM, carrying their beloved macBooks and iPads while pretending to be into FOSS. I use Apple devices knowingly what they are for, not as replacement for something else.
I've partially switched from MacOS X to Linux now that wayland pipewire is reaching a mostly functional state and am quite happy with it. It took me maybe 150 hours to do the switch though during quarantine, and I still haven't managed to be able to properly connect to SMB at work...
What problem do you have connecting to SMB?
It's one of the things that work better for me on Linux than on MacOS (no problem with browsing shares, no disappearing shares, no problem with non-normalized unicode filenames).
Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?
#917Earlier quoted context omitted.
Developers who use macOS as shiny GNU/Linux replacement are only getting what they deserve, they should have supported Linux OEMs to start with. Those that show up at FOSDEM, carrying their beloved macBooks and iPads while pretending to be into FOSS. I use Apple devices knowingly what they are for, not as replacement for something else.
Sadly it's not the "shiny"... it's the fact that Mac OS has a GUI that works. Been using linux since the days you installed Slackware from floppies and recompiled your kernel to get drivers. Command line has always been a bliss, but no one has managed to come up with an usable and consistent GUI yet. Btw does sleep work on linux laptops these days? How's hi dpi support?
You know, many things changed since time Slackware was installed from floppies. Even Macs got working virtual memory meanwhile.
Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?
#918Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting analysis, thanks for sharing. command line apps installed via home-brew don't have gate-keeper/notarization though. I don't know why ppl seem to think they do... What am I missing? I'm on the latest Catalina and, for me, anything installed via home-brew / scripts/c++/python/rust I write and run/compile myself, just run. I also don't see any time different between my apps on linux and macOS. I use itemr2,…
Maybe you're missing to foresee the future step in Apple's strategy which will make it harder if not impossible to run something like Homebrew? As far as I know there is no such thing on (non-jailbroken) iOS. Apple seems be be steering macOS in that direction, a curated platform instead of a general-purpose computing device.
If they do that, I am gone. Parent mentioned that they feared that though 10 years ago and it never really happened.
Apple seems to be trying to walk a line with MacOS and keep all of its user bases happy, but it's a hard line to walk.
Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?
#919Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone used that walled garden approach on my PC I'd be furious. As this article shows, Apple is slowly moving in that direction for their PCs. They aren't going to be satisfied with locking down their phones only.
Are they really moving in that direction, though? An App Store from which you can download software with confidence is a pretty sensible first step for most users. Complementing that with a Notarization service for apps that can't live in the App Store, while still giving both users and developers confidence that the user is installing the "real" app, and not something malicious, seems like a pretty sensible way to p…
> They already have Mac App Store, and they already have the infrastructure to deal with a "whitelist only" approach, so why bother with this Notarization and Gatekeeper stuff at all?
Change management. For the same reason why Ebay had to backtrack changing their background color and do it again, slowly.
Re: MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?
#920I had put off upgrading for a long time because nothing good can come from running the latest stable release. They've never been stable. But Apple sort of forced me to update recently since wanted to back up my phone, which I wanted to do before switching to a new one. I imagined that it would be better after a year. Boy was I wrong, and I regret doing it much. It has been a constant pain ever since, bluetooth is com…
Those all sound like unusual problems. What external hardware and phone are you using?