I remember reading about “xlock” and how its bare-bones appearance was a security feature. Namely, if you aren’t loading in standard GUI libraries or other stu

I remember reading about “xlock” and how its bare-bones appearance was a security feature. Namely, if you aren’t loading in standard GUI libraries or other stuff, there is a lot less to attack and less that can fail and leave the screen unlocked. You have to do similar things when handling catastrophic errors, lest you trigger yet another failure simply in the process of displaying the original error. While users might be a little unimpressed, perhaps it is time to pop up the barest of interfaces and make that the only UI, free from the rest of the OS. And if I had to guess, that may be one of Apple’s goals with Touch Bar: while it can display Apple Pay prompts, etc. it could also theoretically serve as a well-isolated prompt system for messages that must not have full access to the system.