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Apple has already talked about this during the Epic Games trial[1]: > As Apple has notched the most successful sales of Mac computers in history, its head of s

Apple has already talked about this during the Epic Games trial[1]: > As Apple has notched the most successful sales of Mac computers in history, its head of software engineering, Craig Federighi, says attacks have risen as well. "Today, we have a level of malware on the Mac that we don't find acceptable," > Each week, Apple identifies a couple pieces of malware on its own or with help of third parties, Federighi added, and it uses built-in systems to automatically remove them from customers' computers. But still, the malware can infect hundreds of thousands of computers before Apple stamps it out. Since last May, Federighi said, there have been 130 types of Mac malware, and one of them alone infected 300,000 systems. > Federighi said he believes Macs are still more secure than PCs, but he made clear that the Mac's facing a "significantly larger malware problem" than are iPhones , iPads and Apple's other devices. "It's an endless game of whack-a-mole." [1] https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/apple-cites-significant-malware-on-mac-while-defending-ios-app-store-in-fortnite-trial/ https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/apple-cites-significant-ma...

jchw 3y ago
This is a great demonstration of how Apple plays both sides of the same coin, picking which one at its convenience. But freedom vs security is a balancing act in literally every system. Not just iPhones, and not just computers. Not acknowledging the importance of the "freedom" aspect of things, not just as a matter of allowing end users to utilize their computers as they please, but also as a matter of fairness for the digital transactions that happen on them, allows Apple to defend their practices and especially, their extremely lucrative monopoly over monetary transactions on their platform. Note that Apple's solution on macOS has been not just to shrug and block off the ability to run arbitrary code (though they certainly have discouraged it a lot), they have actually also made genuine improvements to the security story on macOS. While we're at it, they also have been doing the same on iOS this entire time, because iPhone and iPad are also not free of malware either. (Would have been nice if they shared the numbers, but it seems like "significantly less" is the best we're going to get.) This is exactly why I think it's really important to pay attention to the way they are treating government regulation to see what their true intent is. Obviously, Apple cares about malware in part because it can be damaging to their brand, so there need be no altruism involved in their desire to defeat malware. But also, modifying their operating system for the Chinese market to phone home inside of Safari and add tracing to Airdrop are things that they seem all too happy to do, and those things are not only not helpful to their users, but actively harmful. Apple is happy to do it because like many companies, they deeply desire access to the very large and increasingly lucrative Chinese market. This is a great demonstration that apparently needs to be made that your best interests are not Apple's primary concerns when making product decisions. The incentives can line up sometimes, but it's a hell of a lot more likely that the incentive that is lining up here is actually an 80+ billion dollar per year market that they don't want to lose a red cent of. This is some pretty basic Occam's razor, but all of this non-sense about how scary the security of allowing people to install software packages is has clouded things up severely. Note that nobody has actually asked for sideloading outside of any sort of app store to be particularly easy or simple, as far as I am aware. It just needs to be possible, and not just "pay $99/year, install XCode, sign your apps and load them temporarily"-type non-sense.

jchw 3y ago

This is a great demonstration of how Apple plays both sides of the same coin, picking which one at its convenience. But freedom vs security is a balancing act in literally every system. Not just iPhones, and not just computers. Not acknowledging the importance of the "freedom" aspect of things, not just as a matter of allowing end users to utilize their computers as they please, but also as a matter of fairness for the digital transactions that happen on them, allows Apple to defend their practices and especially, their extremely lucrative monopoly over monetary transactions on their platform. Note that Apple's solution on macOS has been not just to shrug and block off the ability to run arbitrary code (though they certainly have discouraged it a lot), they have actually also made genuine improvements to the security story on macOS. While we're at it, they also have been doing the same on iOS this entire time, because iPhone and iPad are also not free of malware either. (Would have been nice if they shared the numbers, but it seems like "significantly less" is the best we're going to get.) This is exactly why I think it's really important to pay attention to the way they are treating government regulation to see what their true intent is. Obviously, Apple cares about malware in part because it can be damaging to their brand, so there need be no altruism involved in their desire to defeat malware. But also, modifying their operating system for the Chinese market to phone home inside of Safari and add tracing to Airdrop are things that they seem all too happy to do, and those things are not only not helpful to their users, but actively harmful. Apple is happy to do it because like many companies, they deeply desire access to the very large and increasingly lucrative Chinese market. This is a great demonstration that apparently needs to be made that your best interests are not Apple's primary concerns when making product decisions. The incentives can line up sometimes, but it's a hell of a lot more likely that the incentive that is lining up here is actually an 80+ billion dollar per year market that they don't want to lose a red cent of. This is some pretty basic Occam's razor, but all of this non-sense about how scary the security of allowing people to install software packages is has clouded things up severely. Note that nobody has actually asked for sideloading outside of any sort of app store to be particularly easy or simple, as far as I am aware. It just needs to be possible, and not just "pay $99/year, install XCode, sign your apps and load them temporarily"-type non-sense.