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This is impressive, but if you care about privacy then why are you using MacOS to begin with? It seems like you could never be completely certain that it is saf

This is impressive, but if you care about privacy then why are you using MacOS to begin with? It seems like you could never be completely certain that it is safe. Rather than starting with a closed system and ripping out the parts that spy on you, why not start with an open system like Linux or OpenBSD?

Gigachad 3y ago
I don't think privacy is such a simple scale like this. I actually trust my macbook to be more secure than my Linux desktop. Apple has spent orders of magnitude more securing this device, while my Linux desktop setup is mostly only ensured to be generally working. If anyone with the smallest amount of skill had physical access to my desktop, they could replace the bootloader with a malicious one and get everything when I next log in. While my macbook is secured against basically everyone but top tier federal agents. If I left my macbook in a hotel room, I can reasonably expect it has not been tampered with. There doesn't seem to be any real version of SIP on Linux. Basically every program I run requires full access to everything. Flatpak is sort of tightening things up but it still has a long way to go to close all the loose ends. So while I might have more control over my linux machine, I still trust my macbook more.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Out-of-box, you're generally right. "Hacking" the average Linux user with Secure Boot disabled and a default GRUB configuration with unencrypted ext4 root is like taking candy from a baby. It does beg the question of which system can be more secure, though. Apple has a decently high bar out-of-box, but they could certainly do more to make MacOS a trustless ecosystem. The simple fact that all of MacOS is basically unaccountable from a programming perspective is both a security flaw and a privacy concern. Whereas a public codebase like Linux receives constant intersectional scrutiny, closed systems like MacOS can't have that same attention. Non-transparent codebases cut both ways: they can hide embarassing bugs from people reading the source, but it can also protect zero-days and backdoors that would have otherwise been identified and fixed. Transparent systems only seek a ground truth. So... it's a toss-up. I wouldn't put my life on the line if I was a political dissident considering a Macbook, but Joe Shmoe and his wedding photo editing business should have all the security it needs.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    GNU Linux desktop can’t be made more secure than a Mac in my opinion, without having to rewrite the whole thing to the point where calling it general linux desktop is a stretch. But this is not an OS property - if one would install Android, then the security would improve severalfold, likely better than OSX (mobile OSs are much more modern and security oriented). The reason is that the old-school UNIX permission system is way too crude. The minimum is to run every process under a new user, so that its permissions would even start to make sense. SELinux is also important, as well as secure IPC. Android has all that solved. GrapheneOS on sufficiently secure hardware (! Unfortunately open-source laptops are very bad in this category), which has to be a Pixel for now trades blows with iphones.
    - Gigachad 3y ago
      The Linux security model was designed for a time when you had multiple humans sharing one machine, and every program either came from the OS, or was sourced from a reputable origin. It's almost useless in the current landscape. Some efforts like Flatpak, Wayland, Pipewire, and immutable OSs are starting to improve things, but it still seems like we are years away from having the level of security MacOS had a long time ago. And I just can't see how any security measure which requires hardware can come to Linux desktop.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        > And I just can't see how any security measure which requires hardware can come to Linux desktop. Why? TPM works just fine. Secure Boot is perfectly usable on most OSes. Hell, even fprintd supports biometric authentication if you're a weirdo. Nothing inherently stops this stuff from being made, certainly not the kernel. All hardware-based security measures will probably never be supported by Linux, but if your benchmark for disbelief is "any" then boy have I got a boat to sell you!
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    I'm not sure if the MacOS codebase gets as much review as Linux, but what makes MacOS more secure is that they utilize multiple layers of security. Finding a bug in a single component is often not enough. Which is why even after countless bugs found in macos and ios, we never see things like the secure enclave and encryption keys compromised, because they are layered out and unaffected by bugs in the OS. We are at the point where being bug free is impossible and patching after discovery is not good enough. Secure designs must protect against undiscovered bugs.
- kaba0 3y ago
  Yeah, even a package install, or npm invocation could easily install a keylogger with full network access, or go over the file system and encrypt it.
lisasays 3y ago
Why not start with an open system like Linux or OpenBSD? Probably because they were traumatized by how much extra work that was (and for a sub-par desktop experience overall), last time they went down that rabbit hole.
- derstander 3y ago
  > Probably because they were traumatized by how much extra work that was (and for a sub-par desktop experience overall), last time they went down that rabbit hole. I’m in that camp. I ran Slackware on a Compaq laptop in the early 2000’s and it was more work than I would have liked — though I did have more free time then as a student. I swapped to macOS and have been using that since for work and personal productivity projects, though I do use windows to play games. When my MacBook went on the fritz, I was forced to become acquainted with WSL. And I find it to be pretty usable for my use cases. My MacBook is a bit aged at this point and probably needs replacement before too long. But now instead of comparing OSes (Linux or windows with WSL vs macOS), I need to think about hardware: battery life, build quality, and performance; my needs in these categories may still favor Apple in the laptop and small form factors.
- User23 3y ago
  Has the OpenBSD “desktop experience” progressed past xterm and fvwm2 yet?
  - vogon_laureate 3y ago
    If you mean the default experience, no. Gnome, Xfce, KDE, LXQt, Lumina, DWM, etc are all in ports and packages and fairly straightforward to get set up.
geraltofrivia 3y ago
It really sounds like: if you care about Privacy, why do you care about anything else? I want both, privacy and convenience of a Mac OS. I shouldn’t have to compromise.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Note - privacy not guaranteed if Apple is subpoenaed for information: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html In this case, Apple may be compelled to turn over device, account or financial data. So don't do anything bad* and lose your privacy privileges! *Definition of 'bad' subject to local law and interpretation.
  - solarkraft 3y ago
    That's for the data they have, which they generally minimize reasonably well.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    While Apple surely has plenty metadata on users, many of your data is actually e2e encrypted.
    - trympet 3y ago
      I am willing to bet my left nut that they don't encrypt common metadata and telemetry at rest.
      - kaba0 3y ago
        Why wouldn’t they? They can analyze it as much as they want even if it’s encrypted (by them), while not doing so would just open them up to to the legal ramifications of data leaks. So, I would reserve my nuts for better bets.
        smoldesu 3y ago
MisterTea 3y ago
And I'd happily run them if the hardware situation wasn't so damn grim. There's no Arm booting standard so you have to re-invent the kernel for each model of chip vs just booting an x86 PC and let the kernel poke at discoverable hardware and figure it out. Arm has old-school ISA like configuration for your non-discoverable hardware with devicetrees preventing generalized kernels from existing. Someone please make open booting and hardware configuration for a general OS on Arm a reality. Without standard booting I feel that open source OS phones will never exist. They're always behind on driver development leaving users with buggy battery murdering devices that are missing features. Dev's don't want to bother with messy alpha quality platforms. They move slow as they don't have FAANG money so the platforms never gain momentum. Simple general booting will change that - no more recompiling a kernel using some byzantine labyrinth build system - just write an image to SD or USB and boot.
- sunk1st 3y ago
  Please expand on “devicetrees [prevent]… generalized kernels from existing,“ if you don’t mind.
  - MisterTea 3y ago
    I am wrong there, they describe non-discoverable hardware so they are useful. I am confusing them with the issue of getting a kernels built for a lot of the poorly documented hardware that varies a bunch which device trees try to solve but don't. No two vendors agree on how to boot things. I cant just download ubuntu or even openbsd for my phone or tablet as each of those has its own boot loader. Too splintered of a platform.
    - sunk1st 3y ago
      Thanks for your response. It’s an interesting perspective. From my point of view the idea of having incompatible boot protocols is a feature, not a bug. Fundamental differences must exist at some point in the hierarchy. Why not the boot mechanism?
      - 3y ago

Gigachad 3y ago

I don't think privacy is such a simple scale like this. I actually trust my macbook to be more secure than my Linux desktop. Apple has spent orders of magnitude more securing this device, while my Linux desktop setup is mostly only ensured to be generally working. If anyone with the smallest amount of skill had physical access to my desktop, they could replace the bootloader with a malicious one and get everything when I next log in. While my macbook is secured against basically everyone but top tier federal agents. If I left my macbook in a hotel room, I can reasonably expect it has not been tampered with. There doesn't seem to be any real version of SIP on Linux. Basically every program I run requires full access to everything. Flatpak is sort of tightening things up but it still has a long way to go to close all the loose ends. So while I might have more control over my linux machine, I still trust my macbook more.

smoldesu 3y ago
Out-of-box, you're generally right. "Hacking" the average Linux user with Secure Boot disabled and a default GRUB configuration with unencrypted ext4 root is like taking candy from a baby. It does beg the question of which system can be more secure, though. Apple has a decently high bar out-of-box, but they could certainly do more to make MacOS a trustless ecosystem. The simple fact that all of MacOS is basically unaccountable from a programming perspective is both a security flaw and a privacy concern. Whereas a public codebase like Linux receives constant intersectional scrutiny, closed systems like MacOS can't have that same attention. Non-transparent codebases cut both ways: they can hide embarassing bugs from people reading the source, but it can also protect zero-days and backdoors that would have otherwise been identified and fixed. Transparent systems only seek a ground truth. So... it's a toss-up. I wouldn't put my life on the line if I was a political dissident considering a Macbook, but Joe Shmoe and his wedding photo editing business should have all the security it needs.
- kaba0 3y ago
  GNU Linux desktop can’t be made more secure than a Mac in my opinion, without having to rewrite the whole thing to the point where calling it general linux desktop is a stretch. But this is not an OS property - if one would install Android, then the security would improve severalfold, likely better than OSX (mobile OSs are much more modern and security oriented). The reason is that the old-school UNIX permission system is way too crude. The minimum is to run every process under a new user, so that its permissions would even start to make sense. SELinux is also important, as well as secure IPC. Android has all that solved. GrapheneOS on sufficiently secure hardware (! Unfortunately open-source laptops are very bad in this category), which has to be a Pixel for now trades blows with iphones.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    The Linux security model was designed for a time when you had multiple humans sharing one machine, and every program either came from the OS, or was sourced from a reputable origin. It's almost useless in the current landscape. Some efforts like Flatpak, Wayland, Pipewire, and immutable OSs are starting to improve things, but it still seems like we are years away from having the level of security MacOS had a long time ago. And I just can't see how any security measure which requires hardware can come to Linux desktop.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      > And I just can't see how any security measure which requires hardware can come to Linux desktop. Why? TPM works just fine. Secure Boot is perfectly usable on most OSes. Hell, even fprintd supports biometric authentication if you're a weirdo. Nothing inherently stops this stuff from being made, certainly not the kernel. All hardware-based security measures will probably never be supported by Linux, but if your benchmark for disbelief is "any" then boy have I got a boat to sell you!
- Gigachad 3y ago
  I'm not sure if the MacOS codebase gets as much review as Linux, but what makes MacOS more secure is that they utilize multiple layers of security. Finding a bug in a single component is often not enough. Which is why even after countless bugs found in macos and ios, we never see things like the secure enclave and encryption keys compromised, because they are layered out and unaffected by bugs in the OS. We are at the point where being bug free is impossible and patching after discovery is not good enough. Secure designs must protect against undiscovered bugs.
kaba0 3y ago
Yeah, even a package install, or npm invocation could easily install a keylogger with full network access, or go over the file system and encrypt it.

lisasays 3y ago

Why not start with an open system like Linux or OpenBSD? Probably because they were traumatized by how much extra work that was (and for a sub-par desktop experience overall), last time they went down that rabbit hole.

derstander 3y ago
> Probably because they were traumatized by how much extra work that was (and for a sub-par desktop experience overall), last time they went down that rabbit hole. I’m in that camp. I ran Slackware on a Compaq laptop in the early 2000’s and it was more work than I would have liked — though I did have more free time then as a student. I swapped to macOS and have been using that since for work and personal productivity projects, though I do use windows to play games. When my MacBook went on the fritz, I was forced to become acquainted with WSL. And I find it to be pretty usable for my use cases. My MacBook is a bit aged at this point and probably needs replacement before too long. But now instead of comparing OSes (Linux or windows with WSL vs macOS), I need to think about hardware: battery life, build quality, and performance; my needs in these categories may still favor Apple in the laptop and small form factors.
User23 3y ago
Has the OpenBSD “desktop experience” progressed past xterm and fvwm2 yet?
- vogon_laureate 3y ago
  If you mean the default experience, no. Gnome, Xfce, KDE, LXQt, Lumina, DWM, etc are all in ports and packages and fairly straightforward to get set up.

geraltofrivia 3y ago

It really sounds like: if you care about Privacy, why do you care about anything else? I want both, privacy and convenience of a Mac OS. I shouldn’t have to compromise.

smoldesu 3y ago
Note - privacy not guaranteed if Apple is subpoenaed for information: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html In this case, Apple may be compelled to turn over device, account or financial data. So don't do anything bad* and lose your privacy privileges! *Definition of 'bad' subject to local law and interpretation.
- solarkraft 3y ago
  That's for the data they have, which they generally minimize reasonably well.
- kaba0 3y ago
  While Apple surely has plenty metadata on users, many of your data is actually e2e encrypted.
  - trympet 3y ago
    I am willing to bet my left nut that they don't encrypt common metadata and telemetry at rest.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      Why wouldn’t they? They can analyze it as much as they want even if it’s encrypted (by them), while not doing so would just open them up to to the legal ramifications of data leaks. So, I would reserve my nuts for better bets.
      - smoldesu 3y ago

MisterTea 3y ago

And I'd happily run them if the hardware situation wasn't so damn grim. There's no Arm booting standard so you have to re-invent the kernel for each model of chip vs just booting an x86 PC and let the kernel poke at discoverable hardware and figure it out. Arm has old-school ISA like configuration for your non-discoverable hardware with devicetrees preventing generalized kernels from existing. Someone please make open booting and hardware configuration for a general OS on Arm a reality. Without standard booting I feel that open source OS phones will never exist. They're always behind on driver development leaving users with buggy battery murdering devices that are missing features. Dev's don't want to bother with messy alpha quality platforms. They move slow as they don't have FAANG money so the platforms never gain momentum. Simple general booting will change that - no more recompiling a kernel using some byzantine labyrinth build system - just write an image to SD or USB and boot.

sunk1st 3y ago
Please expand on “devicetrees [prevent]… generalized kernels from existing,“ if you don’t mind.
- MisterTea 3y ago
  I am wrong there, they describe non-discoverable hardware so they are useful. I am confusing them with the issue of getting a kernels built for a lot of the poorly documented hardware that varies a bunch which device trees try to solve but don't. No two vendors agree on how to boot things. I cant just download ubuntu or even openbsd for my phone or tablet as each of those has its own boot loader. Too splintered of a platform.
  - sunk1st 3y ago
    Thanks for your response. It’s an interesting perspective. From my point of view the idea of having incompatible boot protocols is a feature, not a bug. Fundamental differences must exist at some point in the hierarchy. Why not the boot mechanism?
    - 3y ago