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Sure. But as Brendan Gregg pointed out in his comment - doing this at the level of exec() on a UNIX-like OS is ... a questionable technical choice to say the l
by drvdevd 6y ago
Sure. But as Brendan Gregg pointed out in his comment - doing this at the level of exec() on a UNIX-like OS is ... a questionable technical choice to say the least.
What’s the Linux equivalent of “notarization”? I’m not sure. Of course there’s probably more than one answer to that - let’s just taking signing packages as an example.
In theory Apple could put their weight behind vetting some of the popular open source packages perhaps? Or delegate that to the maintainers of those repositories and make them trusted? Like homebrew, for example (maybe a poor example, but you see how I’m trying to compare this with Linux...)
This is after all, what actually makes macOS useful to people on the command line 99% of the time, anyway.
So anyway, I agree on the surface it seems like this might be beneficial to Apple, but it doesn’t appear to be well considered.
They could invest more time in better sandbox and/or container type features that let people define some of their own more granular security boundaries. But they aren’t I guess? What are they doing here?
- john_alan 6y agoWatching the notarization video from WWDC last year they explicitly said it wouldn’t affect command line apps.
- pjmlp 6y agoApple OSes never were about CLI, pre-OS X you didn't have a CLI as standard OS feature. Selling UNIX underpinning was just a marketing move for willing to betray GNU/Linux and BSD in name of a better laptop experience, instead of helping OEMs selling their stuff. Something that NeXT also did against the Sun workstations market. On Linux side of the this kind of security measures never work, because the moment someone introduces something like this, the distribution gets forked. It works on ChromeOS and Android, because it hardly matters to userspace that Linux is the actual kernel, Google could embark (and it is actually) in a kernel replacement project and most stuff would just work.
- saagarjha 6y agoI'm not sure I particularly appreciate your use of the word "betray" for the BSDs. Sure, macOS is not really a great adherent to the GNU philosophy, but for the BSDs it actually did fairly well for a while. (It's still true UNIX, if barely.)
- pjmlp 6y agoTake as you wish, if those users were actually supportive of the BSDs, they would be giving their hard earned cash directly to OEMs selling proper FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly based devices. One cannot give the money instead to Apple and then come back complain that they were mislead. NeXTSTEP was also a true UNIX, that wasn't why most business bought it, rather Renderman and other graphical based tooling. I have used Apple platforms on and off since the LC II days, their commercial view was always quite clear to me.
- saagarjha 6y agoI am actually curious who sells BSD hardware these days.
- pjmlp 6y agoExamples from Germany, https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/ https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/ They do GNU/Linux, but BSDs should probably work on their hardware, as mentioned on this old post (sorry in German). https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/de/Infos/News/OpenBSD-6-3-current-auf-dem-TUXEDO-InfinityBook-Pro-14.tuxedo https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/de/Infos/News/OpenBSD-6-3-cu... Or by getting in touch with companies like os-cillation. https://www.os-cillation.de/en/opensourceprojekte/bsd-special https://www.os-cillation.de/en/opensourceprojekte/bsd-specia...
- saagarjha 6y agoThanks for the links. I probably won’t be buying any of those soon, but they looked surprisingly beefy for the price point. As an aside, the immature part of me giggled a bit to see the German for product dimensions: > max 1,65cm dick