It was an expired certificate check that failed ungracefully. All you had to do was black hole the Apple server in DNS (just add it to your hosts file with a b

It was an expired certificate check that failed ungracefully. All you had to do was black hole the Apple server in DNS (just add it to your hosts file with a bogus IP address) and apps launched fine. Apparently no one at Apple tested the code to make it fail if the server acknowledged but never otherwise responded. If the server isn't there, the code failed gracefully (and immediately). I'm sure that race condition has been patched and any similar code now has several new test to their QA suite. Live and learn. These checks are also anonymized and are also covered in their privacy policy. As a publicly traded company, making false statements in such a policy would have severe financial implications so anyone implying Apple are lying better have some damn good evidence to back it up. Since these checks are useful in weeding out malicious software once the server was back up I removed the Apple server from my hosts file to let them resume. If you think Apple is full of crap from a privacy standpoint you can continue to block the certificate server involved in the checks and your Mac still runs just fine. Which is my core problem with crap "articles" like this. I really like the FSF, but sensationalistic pieces like this DO NOT help their messaging - especially when they are factually inaccurate :( NOTHING was locked down; it was a security check that failed ungracefully but could be easily bypassed to enable the machine to function normally. If it was "locked down" there would have been no bypass.