I’ll also be curious if placing the app in ~/Applications avoids the restriction. This has long been my way to get around some of the restrictions at work. /Applications requires admin rights, ~/Applications does not. Apps still show up in LaunchPad and work as normal (as far as I’ve seen), they are just only available to the user, instead of all users, which is fine for my situation. I used to have to request admin rights every time VS Code wanted to update on my work laptop, but since I put it in my user folder instead, it’s been smooth sailing.
They don't.
> I’ll also be curious if placing the app in ~/Applications avoids the restriction.
It doesn't.
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 step on the gas and change course, it's a fools illusion because the people who actually can make a difference will not be there and the whole organization already is tuned for the wrong incentives, so when Tim Apple's minions step of the gas... nothing will happen other than pumping out more "beautiful, amazing, thinner" but useless slop.
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 argument against this when the typical user is not a l33t hacker type and most typical users find it extremely easy to download and run malware.
Every version of macOS makes it harder and harder to run unsigned code. They keep pushing the bypass deeper and making it less convenient. It’s super super annoying and stupid.
You're free to distribute (and sell) your notarized app however you want.
Provided you’re continuing paying every year.
I have no problem with the fee, but getting that frickin signing process just right took me days to get working right the first time.
There is also the quetion of privacy, for FOSS creators who are not a company, to have their real name shipped with the binary.
Or is all of this theatrics to try and resuscitate the probably-dead Mac App Store?
https://9to5mac.com/2024/08/06/macos-sequoia-screen-recordin...
- 1Password requires supplying a password hint when changing the master password.
- Unifi OS enforcing password quality requirements even when locally/self hosted.
- "Set up later" (instead of "No") as the negative option for various "helpful" feature prompts in iOS.That said I can certainly see the argument that Apple isn’t going about handling this set of problems correctly, but ignoring it or pretending it doesn’t exist isn’t right either.
Most are.
But the OSes could be designed way better for this stuff too.
Give the user security but also total visibility. A central place to grant/revoke app permissions, and to check what all apps ask for, click to see their "privacy policy" or lack thereof, has an easy way to filter to see e.g. "which apps use the camera, when they last used it", etc.
When some app is blocked and you wonder why it doesn't work, it should be easy to see a list of "blocked apps" and sort them by "when they were blocked" and other such things.
I've spend literally days attempting to get a Python-based GUI application "signed", using every available packaging option and dozens of different approaches recommended by a multitude of different sources.
Absolute failure -- and no usable error messages indicating what might be wrong. Just basically "no, you can't upload that.".
This does not bode well...
What, in the past 10 years of MacOS development trends, suggested to you that anything was headed in the remote direction of "boding well"?
This is the first time I've tried to develop something to target a macOS installation -- and it was a train-wreck.
This is going to make running a DisplayLink (not DisplayPort) display very onerous if not impossible.
I guess I only get to use 2 external screens if I'm forced to upgrade my work mac.
> Putting EAS and utilisation clamping together, we took a 15" M2 MacBook Air from about 6 hours of useable battery life just sitting at the desktop to about 8-10 hours of 1080p30 YouTube, 12-15 hours of desktop use, and an enormous 25-28 hours of screen-off idle time. We still have many more tricks up our sleeves to eke out more battery life, and a deep dive on EAS utilisation clamping is in the works. Watch this space!
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asahi-Linux-improves-battery-l...
But with the remaining outstanding hardware issues and the battery life gap in mind, I will probably get an overall better experience sooner if I just pony up for the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite laptop from Tuxedo Computers¹. :-\
On the other hand, the whole Linux desktop stack has benefited from work that Asahi devs have done, so I think that project is still undeniably valuable even for users on other aarch64 hardware.
--
1: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/TUXEDO-on-ARM-is-coming.t...
Long time ago, you could run any executable you wanted. Then, you got a little nag, but whatever. Then (I think) you had to right click and take an extra step to run them, with a scary warning. Then, you got an even scarier warning and had to navigate into Settings to select "Allow applications downloaded from" -> Anywhere. Then, they removed the "Anywhere" option, but you could re-enable it with the command line.
It's also directionally clear: They surely intend to fully boil the frog one day and remove the ability to do this.
Se also: The UX you have to navigate in order to fill your own password into web pages on Safari.
Will Right Click > Open still work? That is how I currently bypass this issue with unsigned applications.
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine
will keep working.
At the moment I'm just linking to https://disable-gatekeeper.github.io/ and hoping that if anyone ever comes across my repo, that they know how to read and won't bother me about it. Maybe in the future the optimal solution would be to just not provide any pre-built binaries.
Or users who were told to "control click" by malicious sites peddling trojan horses and other stuff, so that they never see a warning
Untrue. You always see a warning: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/unsigned.html
I'm OK with this. When the prompt appears, you're very much trying to do something else, and ya don't need the detour. "Bug me l8r plz."
As to what Apple may eventually do, just seems a little speculative.
Putting this in system settings makes sense.
I don’t think Apple has truly considered the ramifications of their little security tricks.
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
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 processes and standards for curating, vetting, categorizating and sometimes even patching software.
One of the reasons that desktop Linux has lagged with app sandboxing and binary attestation compared to macOS is that proprietary apps are marginal and few on most Linux desktops. Linux users are not choosing the bulk of their software from a giant pile of borderline malicious shitware like users of mobile apps generally are. (It's a good thing that Linux is catching up in this respect because some proprietary crap, like Discord, Google Chrome, VSCode, Steam, and Zoom, is extremely sticky for new users coming from proprietary operating systems where proprietary apps are the norm as well as strongly incentivized by powerful network effects. Vendors of such software have proven that they can't be trusted to follow reasonable conventions with DEB or RPM repositories, and Flatpak will suits untrustworthy vendors and other third parties better.)
> I can certainly see the argument that Apple isn’t going about handling this set of problems correctly, but ignoring it or pretending it doesn’t exist isn’t right either.
Apple is understandably prioritizing the realities of the ecosystems that the bulk of their existing users navigate, namely one of publishers selling software as commodities and services for financial profit. But it's not the only conceivable path forward because not all ecosystems of usable software are dominated by producers facing such incentives. You can answer the proprietary hellscape by stepping away from it instead of letting yourself be hampered by shit like this on your own machine.
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.
But if you're looking for a way out from Apple's paternalism without giving up too much practical security, getting your software from free software distributions as much as possible and treating F/OSS as your 'home base' is a doable first step for readers of this site that will go some distance. For example, on macOS, disabling Gatekeeper for software that you install via a package manager whose repositories have a code review process and which cryptographically verifies what it downloads is not a big deal. (Homebrew does such verification, but not for all packages. You can tell it to refuse to install what it can't verify in this way, though. So all my Homebrew apps get installed only if the package has a checksum in the repos, and when installed they get --no-quarantine.)
And if you can switch to Linux on the desktop, it's reasonable to approach app sandboxing in an opt-in way. It's nice to be able to do that, especially as some of the UX pain points are still being worked out. It's also nice to know that no matter what nice capabilities your OS offers for securing your system by treating apps as untrusted by default, you'll ultimately be in control.
Sandboxing is also somewhat a separate issue from code signing and notarization, and idk what's even really practically available on the Linux desktop for that. But I'm not really sold on those so much for use of those outside the enterprise. I imagine most people here would opt out of those given the choice.