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You expect applications to have access to your desktop? You should only ever expect the user to have access to the desktop and, even then, the only apps that w

You expect applications to have access to your desktop? You should only ever expect the user to have access to the desktop and, even then, the only apps that would ever prompt for access to the desktop are those that aren't updated for High Sierra and above. On the latest versions of macOS, the Desktop folder is shared by iCloud. This is definitely not an instance where security has been lowered nor is this the standard behavior of the new OS.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> You expect applications to have access to your desktop? Yes! That's what applications do, they read and write files. Most other software is, more likely than not, either a game or a web page. Does every app need to access my desktop specifically? No. But if we're trying to protect "normal users", I don't think most of them have the wherewithal to think through "what exact locations does and doesn't app X need to access?"
- CDSlice 7y ago
  But they should only read and write files that you give it permission to. E.g, Word should only be reading and writing whatever files you open to edit, it shouldn't be able to access all the files in your Applications folder. If it needs temp files it can write those to it's designated section of the file system.
  - wayneftw 7y ago
    It should read and write whatever files it needs to without bothering me for every little thing. For instance, supposing they want to show you a welcome screen with all of your documents from your Documents folder (or anywhere else) - I don't want some asinine popup asking me for permission. Word is a well-known application. I installed it. I trust it and the corporation that wrote it. That's enough for me. The alleged problem is not even solved by a permission dialog. I should answer OK to the fact that it needs to access all of my Documents, forever, and that's supposed to be more secure? Why not just ask me for permission to my whole drive so it can scan for documents everywhere? Apps will just start asking for more and more permissions like they do on iOS, which is annoying. macOS is slowly but surely being turned into iOS. It's software for the lowest common denominator - the average idiot - which I'm not, at least when it comes to technology. Thankfully, my workstations are all Linux but I still have to deal with both macOS and Windows on a daily basis. But at least on Windows, the permissions annoyances can be avoided by simply not using UWP apps from their app store. I hope there's a way to turn this off on macOS but knowing Apple I doubt there will be because clearly they're on a mission to wipe macOS off the table. Perhaps that would be a good thing though. More people will move to Linux.
    - danieldk 7y ago
      For instance, supposing they want to show you a welcome screen with all of your documents from your Documents folder (or anywhere else) - I don't want some asinine popup asking me for permission. Word is a well-known application. I installed it. I trust it and the corporation that wrote it. That's enough for me. But this is not how it works. Word from the App Store is sandboxed. If you open a document in Word, this is done using the native file opening dialog. This is a separate, privileged process. The file is symlinked into Word's sandbox as a result. This means that Word has access to that file from that point onwards. So, it can show a welcome screen with documents that you have previously opened (which is what applications typically do, very few applications will show all documents). This is how things have worked ever since Apple required sandboxing for App Store apps. The problem is non-App Store apps that are not sandboxed. They have unfettered access to every file. I guess these extra permissions are to provide a certain level of protection against such apps, which is good. Word is a well-known application. I installed it. I trust it and the corporation that wrote it. There are many well-known incidents of trusted applications being compromised and backdoored. E.g.: https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/mac-threat-analysis/2017/05/handbrake-hacked-to-drop-new-variant-of-proton-malware/ https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/mac-threat-ana... To make things worse, the hash was updated in Homebrew cask. So even if you used a package manager, you would have installed a compromised application. Trusting applications may have been ok in the age of shrink-wrapped software. But now that applications are distributed over the web, allowing unfettered access is insanity. More people will move to Linux. The Linux ecosystem is also moving towards immutable base systems (Fedora Silverblue, NixOS) and restricted, sandboxed applications (Flatpak). Sure, it will always be possible to install a 70ies UNIX-style distribution. But the world is moving to sandboxing and putting up more restrictions, because the computing world became more hostile. macOS is slowly but surely being turned into iOS. This is getting tired and old. People said the same thing ten years ago and yet here we are, macOS is still an OS for 'general purpose computing'. I think Apple is finding a nice balance between securing the average user through sandboxing and SIP, while keeping giving the knobs to disable protections to advanced users. I say this as someone who currently uses Linux 95% of the time, but I wish Linux was as far as macOS with application sandboxing and system integrity protection.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Sure, if applications are able to do things in the exact way Apple imagines. Unfortunately, the real world is almost always more messy—there's always at least one exception that isn't provided for by Apple's sandbox. Look at how many Mac apps offer both stripped-down Mac App Store releases and separate, more robust versions if you buy from their official websites. I'm by no means against Sandboxing, by the way. I think it's great that if you want to buy and use sandboxed apps—and are willing to accept more limited functionality as an occasional consequence—the Mac App Store provides that option for you. However, there needs to also be an alternate path, by which I can say "this is an application I trust, please let it do its job." There should, of course, be several different permission levels—Parallels needs its own kernel extension, most applications don't. Permission prompts are an important part of enforcing that. And that's precisely why prompts need to be use sparingly—if you bombard the user with too many of messages, they'll ignore all of them.
- dpkonofa 7y ago
  Applications do not need permission. The user that is currently controlling the application needs to be able to use that application to read and write files but there's no reason that the application needs access when it's not in focus and, with the sandbox model in Catalina, applications have the ability to ask for explicit read/write permissions without prompting the user if they've already given access to install it. The biggest protection here is that the folder is shared via iCloud in most instances. Asking for explicit permission is really the only way to do that safely.
- w0utert 7y ago
  The typical desktop for most user is a dumping ground for whatever it is they are currently working on. Or in some cases more or less anything they've been working on for the past years. A dumping ground full of potentially sensitive documents, work-in-progress files that are not supposed to leak beyond the computer, etc. Do you really think any application on your computer should be allowed to read and write them because "that's what applications do"? 90% of the 'applications' on my computer I didn't even install myself, like uninstallers, updaters, helper applications, background services, whatever. These have no business looking at files in my Desktop folder. And particularly not if its on iCloud and shared with other devices like my phone.
- tinus_hn 7y ago
  Applications can write files perfectly fine without the ‘can access the desktop’ permission. When you tell the application to open a file using the system dialogs, the system automatically grants the application access to read and write the file. The permission is needed only when the application wants to go around the normal way of opening files.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

> You expect applications to have access to your desktop? Yes! That's what applications do, they read and write files. Most other software is, more likely than not, either a game or a web page. Does every app need to access my desktop specifically? No. But if we're trying to protect "normal users", I don't think most of them have the wherewithal to think through "what exact locations does and doesn't app X need to access?"

CDSlice 7y ago
But they should only read and write files that you give it permission to. E.g, Word should only be reading and writing whatever files you open to edit, it shouldn't be able to access all the files in your Applications folder. If it needs temp files it can write those to it's designated section of the file system.
- wayneftw 7y ago
  It should read and write whatever files it needs to without bothering me for every little thing. For instance, supposing they want to show you a welcome screen with all of your documents from your Documents folder (or anywhere else) - I don't want some asinine popup asking me for permission. Word is a well-known application. I installed it. I trust it and the corporation that wrote it. That's enough for me. The alleged problem is not even solved by a permission dialog. I should answer OK to the fact that it needs to access all of my Documents, forever, and that's supposed to be more secure? Why not just ask me for permission to my whole drive so it can scan for documents everywhere? Apps will just start asking for more and more permissions like they do on iOS, which is annoying. macOS is slowly but surely being turned into iOS. It's software for the lowest common denominator - the average idiot - which I'm not, at least when it comes to technology. Thankfully, my workstations are all Linux but I still have to deal with both macOS and Windows on a daily basis. But at least on Windows, the permissions annoyances can be avoided by simply not using UWP apps from their app store. I hope there's a way to turn this off on macOS but knowing Apple I doubt there will be because clearly they're on a mission to wipe macOS off the table. Perhaps that would be a good thing though. More people will move to Linux.
  - danieldk 7y ago
    For instance, supposing they want to show you a welcome screen with all of your documents from your Documents folder (or anywhere else) - I don't want some asinine popup asking me for permission. Word is a well-known application. I installed it. I trust it and the corporation that wrote it. That's enough for me. But this is not how it works. Word from the App Store is sandboxed. If you open a document in Word, this is done using the native file opening dialog. This is a separate, privileged process. The file is symlinked into Word's sandbox as a result. This means that Word has access to that file from that point onwards. So, it can show a welcome screen with documents that you have previously opened (which is what applications typically do, very few applications will show all documents). This is how things have worked ever since Apple required sandboxing for App Store apps. The problem is non-App Store apps that are not sandboxed. They have unfettered access to every file. I guess these extra permissions are to provide a certain level of protection against such apps, which is good. Word is a well-known application. I installed it. I trust it and the corporation that wrote it. There are many well-known incidents of trusted applications being compromised and backdoored. E.g.: https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/mac-threat-analysis/2017/05/handbrake-hacked-to-drop-new-variant-of-proton-malware/ https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/mac-threat-ana... To make things worse, the hash was updated in Homebrew cask. So even if you used a package manager, you would have installed a compromised application. Trusting applications may have been ok in the age of shrink-wrapped software. But now that applications are distributed over the web, allowing unfettered access is insanity. More people will move to Linux. The Linux ecosystem is also moving towards immutable base systems (Fedora Silverblue, NixOS) and restricted, sandboxed applications (Flatpak). Sure, it will always be possible to install a 70ies UNIX-style distribution. But the world is moving to sandboxing and putting up more restrictions, because the computing world became more hostile. macOS is slowly but surely being turned into iOS. This is getting tired and old. People said the same thing ten years ago and yet here we are, macOS is still an OS for 'general purpose computing'. I think Apple is finding a nice balance between securing the average user through sandboxing and SIP, while keeping giving the knobs to disable protections to advanced users. I say this as someone who currently uses Linux 95% of the time, but I wish Linux was as far as macOS with application sandboxing and system integrity protection.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Sure, if applications are able to do things in the exact way Apple imagines. Unfortunately, the real world is almost always more messy—there's always at least one exception that isn't provided for by Apple's sandbox. Look at how many Mac apps offer both stripped-down Mac App Store releases and separate, more robust versions if you buy from their official websites. I'm by no means against Sandboxing, by the way. I think it's great that if you want to buy and use sandboxed apps—and are willing to accept more limited functionality as an occasional consequence—the Mac App Store provides that option for you. However, there needs to also be an alternate path, by which I can say "this is an application I trust, please let it do its job." There should, of course, be several different permission levels—Parallels needs its own kernel extension, most applications don't. Permission prompts are an important part of enforcing that. And that's precisely why prompts need to be use sparingly—if you bombard the user with too many of messages, they'll ignore all of them.
dpkonofa 7y ago
Applications do not need permission. The user that is currently controlling the application needs to be able to use that application to read and write files but there's no reason that the application needs access when it's not in focus and, with the sandbox model in Catalina, applications have the ability to ask for explicit read/write permissions without prompting the user if they've already given access to install it. The biggest protection here is that the folder is shared via iCloud in most instances. Asking for explicit permission is really the only way to do that safely.
w0utert 7y ago
The typical desktop for most user is a dumping ground for whatever it is they are currently working on. Or in some cases more or less anything they've been working on for the past years. A dumping ground full of potentially sensitive documents, work-in-progress files that are not supposed to leak beyond the computer, etc. Do you really think any application on your computer should be allowed to read and write them because "that's what applications do"? 90% of the 'applications' on my computer I didn't even install myself, like uninstallers, updaters, helper applications, background services, whatever. These have no business looking at files in my Desktop folder. And particularly not if its on iCloud and shared with other devices like my phone.
tinus_hn 7y ago
Applications can write files perfectly fine without the ‘can access the desktop’ permission. When you tell the application to open a file using the system dialogs, the system automatically grants the application access to read and write the file. The permission is needed only when the application wants to go around the normal way of opening files.