7 ms·

> If they approve, the settings open, then the user has to find the specific little toggle and enable it. Another security prompt then done. Why isn’t this at m

by xp84 5mo ago

> If they approve, the settings open, then the user has to find the specific little toggle and enable it. Another security prompt then done. Why isn’t this at most 2 prompts? Answer: Because modern-day Apple has subscribed to a particular brand of mitigation for the "noobs will always click 'Allow' especially if you ask them to first" problem. The mitigation is that Apple just dumps you on step 2 of a little 4-5 step mini sysadmin adventure where you prove, every time, that you're sophisticated enough to deserve an exception to the padded-cell walled garden mode they've sealed off 'for your safety.' As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this, but it comes off as deeply disrespectful to me as the user that I can't disable this. What's my solution to prevent grandma or a 10-year-old from clicking "Allow full filesystem access and keylogging" to an executable she downloaded from facebook-security-center-and-password-verification-cgi-bin-ab383 dot xyz? IDK, that's their problem, but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off.

FireBeyond 5mo ago
And then one that grinds my gears, perhaps more than it should: there's no way to change the default browser without explicit user action or consent. But do that and the very next thing that happens when you try to open a browser or a link in an email? "Your browser has been changed from Safari to Chrome. Would you like to use Safari or keep using Chrome?" and for a little salt, the default is "Use Safari".
klodolph 5mo ago
This particular permission is pernicious, ponder for a picosecond the possibilities: It’s used for writing keyloggers. That’s it. It’s the permission that lets you write a keylogger. It SHOULD NOT be just a click away. It should require some extra song and dance, because this is an especially dangerous permission, and the extra friction is justified.
- xp84 5mo ago
  All the permissions are treated the same way though. Microphone access. Screen sharing access. etc. Yes, all could be used to spy on you in evil ways, but the replacement of a straightforward "Want to grant this app the following permissions?" with these stupid little spelunks through the garbage app that is Settings irritates me every time. Apple should throw this whole thing out and replace it with first-launch lists of permissions, with toggles for each. This app 'Zoom' wants "Record the screen, microphone, camera." Then you're done and you don't have to keep searching for it in little lists and relaunching it.
  - klodolph 5mo ago
    Honestly, I think the permissions model for desktop and laptop computers is way too permissive to begin with, I think it just kinda sucks and doesn’t do its job. Apple is kind of fixing it but there is a long way to go. There have been alarm bells ringing in my head for a long time with all these settings, and the fact that they’re buried in the settings app gives me a lot of peace of mind. I’ll click through a lot of boxes and alerts and grant permissions that I shouldn’t. I’m SUPER glad that I won’t accidentally grant, you know, full disk access or accessibility to an app just by clicking on a box that appears at startup. I remember back in the bad old days when I was constantly making extra user accounts just to run some program. Kinda sucked. Hard truth is, you sometimes want to run code that you don’t fully trust.
    - xp84 5mo ago
      > I think the permissions model for desktop and laptop computers is way too permissive to begin with Well, if you feel that way, they do make platforms that sound like a better fit: iPad, iOS, even Android kinda fits that mold. I would call them "toy computers" but that is my bias. It's not a real computer to me if I am not even in control of what code runs on it.
      - klodolph 5mo ago
        Ah, I can see what you’re getting at. There is actually a system which is a better fit for me, which is the Mac. I can still run the software I want on it, and even though the security model isn’t tight enough, it’s improving. Linux is also doable, but there’s extra work involved with setting up separate user accounts for running specific pieces of software, configuring namespaces for those processes, that sort of thing. But this is backwards. I’d rather start with a secure default state and have to configure exceptions. Back in the day I could get that from SELinux strict policies but it seems like those have fallen by the wayside.
        tekne 5mo ago
        Have you considered Docker?
manwe150 5mo ago
That’s likely not quite the reason. It is to make you have to pause to think if this is the action you want to take. On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications. I almost never do. I was looking at settings recently and surprised how often I’d clicked yes by accident (maybe about 5% false click rate?)
- syabro 5mo ago
  but the damage of notifications is almost zero compared to keylogger IMHO
  - greazy 5mo ago
    Notification requests add to decision fatigue, which can lead to bad things.
  - mrpippy 5mo ago
    Right, that’s why you get a simpler yes/no dialog for notifications, and a conplex “navigate to this settings pane and click a separate button” flow for a keylogger
    - setopt 5mo ago
      I’d like a dialog where you are simply asked to repeat a sentence like «yes, record my screen» or «yes, record what I type» into a text field to approve. Straightforward but still makes you think.
      - rswail 5mo ago
        AWS Console has that, but it's infuriating that it has different prompts for different resources, it asks you to type "delete" or "confirm" or the name of the resource. But like most of the AWS Console, each service is different in a unique way.
  - Nursie 5mo ago
    Depends on what you allow and what your level of sophistication is. My mother recently had "There are antivirus notifications taking over half the screen, do I need to click on them and renew Norton?" She'd been somewhere and done something that had allowed an unscrupulous site to flood her with alerts directing her to give payment information to a scam site pretending to be antivirus renewal. When I finally got over there (she doesn't live on the same continent) I went in and disabled notifications on all of her installed browsers. As far as I'm concerned the whole 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.
joshspankit 5mo ago
For a long time, I’ve believed that the actual solution is to make the system transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious. Imagine playing hide and go seek in the salt flats
- thfuran 5mo ago
  What does that actually mean?
  - rmunn 5mo ago
    See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Salt_Flats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Salt_Flats — the salt flats are extremely flat (as the name implies), and because of all the salt, no vegetation can survive. Look at the pictures: there are no trees, no grass, no hiding places at all. Anyone standing (or even lying prone) on the salt flats is visible to anyone else for miles around. GP was saying that systems should be "transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious". I'm not entirely convinced that that's possible (On Trusting Trust should have taught us that compromised systems can create places for the compromise to hide), which means that the salt flats analogy is not a great analogy, IMHO. But at least now you understand the analogy.
    - ileonichwiesz 5mo ago
      I don’t think the analogy was the issue. What does it mean for a system to be so transparent that it’s obvious when it’s compromised?
      - volemo 5mo ago
        I can’t speak for the ancestor, but I think making every screen recording app prominently visible in the status bar would fit the bill.
      - coldtea 5mo ago
        That what apps have permission to access/record what at what times they use it, shouldn't be hidden or scaterred across several Settings panels.
js2 5mo ago
> but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off. I'm not sure if it's what you're asking for, but you can disable SIP: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/disabling-and-enabling-system-integrity-protection https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/disabling...
- jlarocco 5mo ago
  It's been a while since I dumped OSX and went back to Linux, but IIRC, this setting gets reset every time the system updates. At some point Apple realized the "power user" market was too small, and they were better off treating all of their users like idiots. And that's when I left.
  - pjmlp 5mo ago
    The power user market was never that big for Apple since Mac Classic came to be, that was the target market, the "idiots". Desktop power users were on the Acorn, Amiga, Atari and PC. As NeXT "acquired" Apple, Linux users thought OS X was the UNIX experience they were looking for, and since they were never part of Apple culture, keep getting their expectations wrong.
    - thewebguyd 5mo ago
      Apple also kind of accidentally won the power user/developer market. When macbooks became synonymous with SV devs, Windows sucked for everything that wasn't Win32 development, and Linux on the desktop wasn't quite there yet (workable, but no where near the state its in today). Your only other choice was mac. It was UNIX, could dual boot windows if you needed it, so it checked the boxes is nice looking hardware (this was around 2008-2012 era, PC hardware at the time was complete crap). They never set out to build the ultimate power user machine, their target was still general consumers. They just happened to have the right product at the right time when everything else just failed to compete. Had desktop linux been in a better state, or had MS built WSL earlier, things might look a lot different today.
kdheiwns 5mo ago
The scary thing to me is how Apple makes you jump through hoops to install or use any sort of app, but when it comes to adding items to your login items, they don't even require you to grant permission. Tried some little throwaway app and realized you don't need it? Sucks for you. It added itself to your login items and it'll start up in the background every single time you turn on your computer. And it won't even tell you. Thought you deleted the app from your Applications folder? If you didn't check your login items, there's probably some little script that deeply installed itself and it'll reinstall it in the background during your next startup. Adobe is the fucking worst with this. Their Creative Cloud spyware keeps enabling itself and reinstalling itself so long as you use photoshop. And it'll constantly find ways to turn itself back on. Steam also adds itself to login items, which is fucking annoying because you'll reboot and be hit in the face with game ads. At least it respects your decision when you turn it off, but login items should be opt in, never opt out.
- bartvk 5mo ago
  I try to always install with Homebrew. Because then you can uninstall with the --zap option, for example: $ brew uninstall --zap aerospace Usually it blows away everything associated with the app, including cached files, configuration in ~/Library and ~/.config, etc. Very useful. It'll leave a non-functional login item which isn't active and can't be active.
  - bayindirh 5mo ago
    I like the app uninstaller included in Forklift. You open Applications folder, and delete an app. A window appears with all the associated files Forklift can find (which is extremely accurate, BTW), and you can uninstall everything you want from there. For .pkg files, there's UninstallPKG which reads the package manifest and properly uninstalls it.
    - xp84 5mo ago
      I would like to take this moment to rage against Apple for shipping that package installer, literally 25 years ago, and never once having apparently even considered a native, out of the box way to uninstall programs that were installed that way. Speaking of packages, even more embarrassing, Microsoft Windows literally beat them to shipping a first-party package manager. I feel like Apple lives in a fantasy land that the drag’n’drop app install method from the classic macOS is some kind of platonic ideal — never mind that they can’t stop half the apps out there from going outside that paradigm and installing their crap all over the place.
comboy 5mo ago
> As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this, but it comes off as deeply disrespectful to me as the user that I can't disable this. You seem to have understood the problem. But then you didn't follow. If there was a way to disable this, first thing that the grandma would do is watch a video how to disable that and lose security from then on. Of course it is not perfect, but their approach here is really decent. And also, if you find yourself needing to go through that often I think that's not a good sign security-wise.
- merlindru 5mo ago
  Could make it disable-able only from the terminal in recovery mode. That one would be too hard / bothersome to fend off most cases I feel like
  - Moggie100 5mo ago
    Never underestimate the ingenuity of a motivated fool. My litmus test for this sort of thing is Excel - I think we all can agree that Excel is used for way more than it should be, and the most complicated, unhinged uses of it are done by non-technical folks looking to get a task done through desperation.
    - KoolKat23 5mo ago
      At that point it's a them problem.
      - aquariusDue 5mo ago
        Yeah, it always seems weird to me how we deem most adults responsible enough to own a car and not drive into oncoming traffic or how people are allowed to buy actually dangerous tools from big tool stores without a second glance. And sure, there's safety training available and in the case of driving you gotta first prove you're able to follow the rules. But after that? You're on your own, only in computer land do the manufacturers and so on keep holding your hand trying to make sure you're not figuratively cutting it. With that in mind it ends up being weird to me in a way I can't articulate because after all I can speedrun losing a limb if you left me loose in Harbor Freight or speedrun losing all my money and becoming debt-ridden if you give me a laptop with internet connection. Anyway, I know there's more nuanced discussion to be had still I sometimes wonder how would the ideal approach actually look like without requiring people to have a digital(ing) license before being allowed to connect to the internet.
meszmate 5mo ago
It got restrictive enough that I jumped to Linux with Hyprland and just configured everything the way I actually want
- articsputnik 5mo ago
  True, I started with Omarchy, but then changed everything to my liking. It's so much nicer if you can change your OS by changing some dotfiles, and don't get distracted by all the nonsense of new features that macOS and Windows are adding. I wrote about my journey https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/ https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/ and what I learned after 8 months: https://www.ssp.sh/blog/linux-omarchy-the-good-bad-and-fixable/ https://www.ssp.sh/blog/linux-omarchy-the-good-bad-and-fixab...
- marssaxman 5mo ago
  This is the reason I stopped bothering with MacOS, also. Linux just works.
jeroenhd 5mo ago
Making the prompts understandable helps a lot when it comes to preventing your grandma from installing a keylogger. I don't mind the setting not being obvious exactly because people who don't know computers shouldn't be tricked into toggling them. But it is funny to see the daily barrage of permission prompts fly through when macOS made an entire ad ridiculing Vista for half the popups and permissions macOS requires these days.
cmsj 5mo ago
You can make the vast majority of them go away by rebooting into recovery mode, running Terminal and then executing: csrutil disable nvram boot-args="amfi_get_out_of_my_way=0x1" I really wouldn't recommend doing either, but you do you.
harrisi 5mo ago
Ironically, my first thought was using Automator or AutoHotKey (there's a different one for macOS I think? But you get the point) to just identify those dialogs and click yes/allow/whatever. Even though a bunch of the responses are "well you don't want a keylogger" when the first solutions I can think of are also (potential) keyloggers. :)
ibejoeb 5mo ago
That is a solution. But the underlying problem is that they didn't go far enough. There's no good reason to bundle arbitrary screen recording with window snapshots, or bundle arbitrary keylogging with hotkey activation. Just off the top of my head: For previews, Apple could provide an API for this very common task. The OS can provide the images, and they could be sampled at refresh rate that makes it unusable for arbitrary recording. For key chords, they could repurpose the emoji key, which is currently not available for external binding, to effectively allow capture only following that magic sequence. The OS should manage this centrally, allowing a program to define its commands and then delivering only the command without the specific associated keys presses. We get the benefit of centralized management with deconfliction, too, which is a real pain on macos as it stands. I don't know if these solve every problem, but they solve some. There are probably better ways. Apple has plenty of smart programmers. The product team needs to let them solve the problems that they surely know bother their professional users.
WillAdams 5mo ago
Bring back the "Unix expert" checkbox from NeXTstep?
butlike 5mo ago
I oftentimes think that as a nerd, it's easy to walk around like my shit doesn't stink, but then I realize I too have been the victim of clicking through popups mindlessly and probably have done some 'risky computing stuff' I'm unaware of beyond that. As nerds, do we have a higher capacity to fix a mess than a grandma? Sure, probably, but that doesn't mean that we don't make messes.
Wowfunhappy 5mo ago
The solution is that you as the nerd should be able to prove your skills once instead of every time. This is why I’ve personally never had an issue with Gatekeeper—one `spctl --master-disable` and a trip to the Settings menu and you’re done. Why can’t TCC work like this?
osjdiwnfiwjfi 5mo ago
> As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this As a self proclaimed complete nerd I expect you to be insufferable about this—lo and behold... Let’s not pretend these security practices have no use, please. This “I’m such a greybeard, screw modernity” playacting is so tiresome it’s not even quaint any longer.
m463 5mo ago
Wait until they add a captcha so AI can't do it for you.

by xp84 5mo ago

FireBeyond 5mo ago

And then one that grinds my gears, perhaps more than it should: there's no way to change the default browser without explicit user action or consent. But do that and the very next thing that happens when you try to open a browser or a link in an email? "Your browser has been changed from Safari to Chrome. Would you like to use Safari or keep using Chrome?" and for a little salt, the default is "Use Safari".

klodolph 5mo ago

This particular permission is pernicious, ponder for a picosecond the possibilities: It’s used for writing keyloggers. That’s it. It’s the permission that lets you write a keylogger. It SHOULD NOT be just a click away. It should require some extra song and dance, because this is an especially dangerous permission, and the extra friction is justified.

xp84 5mo ago
All the permissions are treated the same way though. Microphone access. Screen sharing access. etc. Yes, all could be used to spy on you in evil ways, but the replacement of a straightforward "Want to grant this app the following permissions?" with these stupid little spelunks through the garbage app that is Settings irritates me every time. Apple should throw this whole thing out and replace it with first-launch lists of permissions, with toggles for each. This app 'Zoom' wants "Record the screen, microphone, camera." Then you're done and you don't have to keep searching for it in little lists and relaunching it.
- klodolph 5mo ago
  Honestly, I think the permissions model for desktop and laptop computers is way too permissive to begin with, I think it just kinda sucks and doesn’t do its job. Apple is kind of fixing it but there is a long way to go. There have been alarm bells ringing in my head for a long time with all these settings, and the fact that they’re buried in the settings app gives me a lot of peace of mind. I’ll click through a lot of boxes and alerts and grant permissions that I shouldn’t. I’m SUPER glad that I won’t accidentally grant, you know, full disk access or accessibility to an app just by clicking on a box that appears at startup. I remember back in the bad old days when I was constantly making extra user accounts just to run some program. Kinda sucked. Hard truth is, you sometimes want to run code that you don’t fully trust.
  - xp84 5mo ago
    > I think the permissions model for desktop and laptop computers is way too permissive to begin with Well, if you feel that way, they do make platforms that sound like a better fit: iPad, iOS, even Android kinda fits that mold. I would call them "toy computers" but that is my bias. It's not a real computer to me if I am not even in control of what code runs on it.
    - klodolph 5mo ago
      Ah, I can see what you’re getting at. There is actually a system which is a better fit for me, which is the Mac. I can still run the software I want on it, and even though the security model isn’t tight enough, it’s improving. Linux is also doable, but there’s extra work involved with setting up separate user accounts for running specific pieces of software, configuring namespaces for those processes, that sort of thing. But this is backwards. I’d rather start with a secure default state and have to configure exceptions. Back in the day I could get that from SELinux strict policies but it seems like those have fallen by the wayside.
      - tekne 5mo ago
        Have you considered Docker?

manwe150 5mo ago

That’s likely not quite the reason. It is to make you have to pause to think if this is the action you want to take. On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications. I almost never do. I was looking at settings recently and surprised how often I’d clicked yes by accident (maybe about 5% false click rate?)

syabro 5mo ago
but the damage of notifications is almost zero compared to keylogger IMHO
- greazy 5mo ago
  Notification requests add to decision fatigue, which can lead to bad things.
- mrpippy 5mo ago
  Right, that’s why you get a simpler yes/no dialog for notifications, and a conplex “navigate to this settings pane and click a separate button” flow for a keylogger
  - setopt 5mo ago
    I’d like a dialog where you are simply asked to repeat a sentence like «yes, record my screen» or «yes, record what I type» into a text field to approve. Straightforward but still makes you think.
    - rswail 5mo ago
      AWS Console has that, but it's infuriating that it has different prompts for different resources, it asks you to type "delete" or "confirm" or the name of the resource. But like most of the AWS Console, each service is different in a unique way.
- Nursie 5mo ago
  Depends on what you allow and what your level of sophistication is. My mother recently had "There are antivirus notifications taking over half the screen, do I need to click on them and renew Norton?" She'd been somewhere and done something that had allowed an unscrupulous site to flood her with alerts directing her to give payment information to a scam site pretending to be antivirus renewal. When I finally got over there (she doesn't live on the same continent) I went in and disabled notifications on all of her installed browsers. As far as I'm concerned the whole 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.

joshspankit 5mo ago

For a long time, I’ve believed that the actual solution is to make the system transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious. Imagine playing hide and go seek in the salt flats

thfuran 5mo ago
What does that actually mean?
- rmunn 5mo ago
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Salt_Flats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Salt_Flats — the salt flats are extremely flat (as the name implies), and because of all the salt, no vegetation can survive. Look at the pictures: there are no trees, no grass, no hiding places at all. Anyone standing (or even lying prone) on the salt flats is visible to anyone else for miles around. GP was saying that systems should be "transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious". I'm not entirely convinced that that's possible (On Trusting Trust should have taught us that compromised systems can create places for the compromise to hide), which means that the salt flats analogy is not a great analogy, IMHO. But at least now you understand the analogy.
  - ileonichwiesz 5mo ago
    I don’t think the analogy was the issue. What does it mean for a system to be so transparent that it’s obvious when it’s compromised?
    - volemo 5mo ago
      I can’t speak for the ancestor, but I think making every screen recording app prominently visible in the status bar would fit the bill.
    - coldtea 5mo ago
      That what apps have permission to access/record what at what times they use it, shouldn't be hidden or scaterred across several Settings panels.

js2 5mo ago

> but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off. I'm not sure if it's what you're asking for, but you can disable SIP: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/disabling-and-enabling-system-integrity-protection https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/disabling...

jlarocco 5mo ago
It's been a while since I dumped OSX and went back to Linux, but IIRC, this setting gets reset every time the system updates. At some point Apple realized the "power user" market was too small, and they were better off treating all of their users like idiots. And that's when I left.
- pjmlp 5mo ago
  The power user market was never that big for Apple since Mac Classic came to be, that was the target market, the "idiots". Desktop power users were on the Acorn, Amiga, Atari and PC. As NeXT "acquired" Apple, Linux users thought OS X was the UNIX experience they were looking for, and since they were never part of Apple culture, keep getting their expectations wrong.
  - thewebguyd 5mo ago
    Apple also kind of accidentally won the power user/developer market. When macbooks became synonymous with SV devs, Windows sucked for everything that wasn't Win32 development, and Linux on the desktop wasn't quite there yet (workable, but no where near the state its in today). Your only other choice was mac. It was UNIX, could dual boot windows if you needed it, so it checked the boxes is nice looking hardware (this was around 2008-2012 era, PC hardware at the time was complete crap). They never set out to build the ultimate power user machine, their target was still general consumers. They just happened to have the right product at the right time when everything else just failed to compete. Had desktop linux been in a better state, or had MS built WSL earlier, things might look a lot different today.

kdheiwns 5mo ago

The scary thing to me is how Apple makes you jump through hoops to install or use any sort of app, but when it comes to adding items to your login items, they don't even require you to grant permission. Tried some little throwaway app and realized you don't need it? Sucks for you. It added itself to your login items and it'll start up in the background every single time you turn on your computer. And it won't even tell you. Thought you deleted the app from your Applications folder? If you didn't check your login items, there's probably some little script that deeply installed itself and it'll reinstall it in the background during your next startup. Adobe is the fucking worst with this. Their Creative Cloud spyware keeps enabling itself and reinstalling itself so long as you use photoshop. And it'll constantly find ways to turn itself back on. Steam also adds itself to login items, which is fucking annoying because you'll reboot and be hit in the face with game ads. At least it respects your decision when you turn it off, but login items should be opt in, never opt out.

bartvk 5mo ago
I try to always install with Homebrew. Because then you can uninstall with the --zap option, for example: $ brew uninstall --zap aerospace Usually it blows away everything associated with the app, including cached files, configuration in ~/Library and ~/.config, etc. Very useful. It'll leave a non-functional login item which isn't active and can't be active.
- bayindirh 5mo ago
  I like the app uninstaller included in Forklift. You open Applications folder, and delete an app. A window appears with all the associated files Forklift can find (which is extremely accurate, BTW), and you can uninstall everything you want from there. For .pkg files, there's UninstallPKG which reads the package manifest and properly uninstalls it.
  - xp84 5mo ago
    I would like to take this moment to rage against Apple for shipping that package installer, literally 25 years ago, and never once having apparently even considered a native, out of the box way to uninstall programs that were installed that way. Speaking of packages, even more embarrassing, Microsoft Windows literally beat them to shipping a first-party package manager. I feel like Apple lives in a fantasy land that the drag’n’drop app install method from the classic macOS is some kind of platonic ideal — never mind that they can’t stop half the apps out there from going outside that paradigm and installing their crap all over the place.

comboy 5mo ago

> As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this, but it comes off as deeply disrespectful to me as the user that I can't disable this. You seem to have understood the problem. But then you didn't follow. If there was a way to disable this, first thing that the grandma would do is watch a video how to disable that and lose security from then on. Of course it is not perfect, but their approach here is really decent. And also, if you find yourself needing to go through that often I think that's not a good sign security-wise.

merlindru 5mo ago
Could make it disable-able only from the terminal in recovery mode. That one would be too hard / bothersome to fend off most cases I feel like
- Moggie100 5mo ago
  Never underestimate the ingenuity of a motivated fool. My litmus test for this sort of thing is Excel - I think we all can agree that Excel is used for way more than it should be, and the most complicated, unhinged uses of it are done by non-technical folks looking to get a task done through desperation.
  - KoolKat23 5mo ago
    At that point it's a them problem.
    - aquariusDue 5mo ago
      Yeah, it always seems weird to me how we deem most adults responsible enough to own a car and not drive into oncoming traffic or how people are allowed to buy actually dangerous tools from big tool stores without a second glance. And sure, there's safety training available and in the case of driving you gotta first prove you're able to follow the rules. But after that? You're on your own, only in computer land do the manufacturers and so on keep holding your hand trying to make sure you're not figuratively cutting it. With that in mind it ends up being weird to me in a way I can't articulate because after all I can speedrun losing a limb if you left me loose in Harbor Freight or speedrun losing all my money and becoming debt-ridden if you give me a laptop with internet connection. Anyway, I know there's more nuanced discussion to be had still I sometimes wonder how would the ideal approach actually look like without requiring people to have a digital(ing) license before being allowed to connect to the internet.

meszmate 5mo ago

It got restrictive enough that I jumped to Linux with Hyprland and just configured everything the way I actually want

articsputnik 5mo ago
True, I started with Omarchy, but then changed everything to my liking. It's so much nicer if you can change your OS by changing some dotfiles, and don't get distracted by all the nonsense of new features that macOS and Windows are adding. I wrote about my journey https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/ https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/ and what I learned after 8 months: https://www.ssp.sh/blog/linux-omarchy-the-good-bad-and-fixable/ https://www.ssp.sh/blog/linux-omarchy-the-good-bad-and-fixab...
marssaxman 5mo ago
This is the reason I stopped bothering with MacOS, also. Linux just works.

jeroenhd 5mo ago

Making the prompts understandable helps a lot when it comes to preventing your grandma from installing a keylogger. I don't mind the setting not being obvious exactly because people who don't know computers shouldn't be tricked into toggling them. But it is funny to see the daily barrage of permission prompts fly through when macOS made an entire ad ridiculing Vista for half the popups and permissions macOS requires these days.

cmsj 5mo ago

You can make the vast majority of them go away by rebooting into recovery mode, running Terminal and then executing: csrutil disable nvram boot-args="amfi_get_out_of_my_way=0x1" I really wouldn't recommend doing either, but you do you.

harrisi 5mo ago

Ironically, my first thought was using Automator or AutoHotKey (there's a different one for macOS I think? But you get the point) to just identify those dialogs and click yes/allow/whatever. Even though a bunch of the responses are "well you don't want a keylogger" when the first solutions I can think of are also (potential) keyloggers. :)

ibejoeb 5mo ago

That is a solution. But the underlying problem is that they didn't go far enough. There's no good reason to bundle arbitrary screen recording with window snapshots, or bundle arbitrary keylogging with hotkey activation. Just off the top of my head: For previews, Apple could provide an API for this very common task. The OS can provide the images, and they could be sampled at refresh rate that makes it unusable for arbitrary recording. For key chords, they could repurpose the emoji key, which is currently not available for external binding, to effectively allow capture only following that magic sequence. The OS should manage this centrally, allowing a program to define its commands and then delivering only the command without the specific associated keys presses. We get the benefit of centralized management with deconfliction, too, which is a real pain on macos as it stands. I don't know if these solve every problem, but they solve some. There are probably better ways. Apple has plenty of smart programmers. The product team needs to let them solve the problems that they surely know bother their professional users.

WillAdams 5mo ago

Bring back the "Unix expert" checkbox from NeXTstep?

butlike 5mo ago

I oftentimes think that as a nerd, it's easy to walk around like my shit doesn't stink, but then I realize I too have been the victim of clicking through popups mindlessly and probably have done some 'risky computing stuff' I'm unaware of beyond that. As nerds, do we have a higher capacity to fix a mess than a grandma? Sure, probably, but that doesn't mean that we don't make messes.

Wowfunhappy 5mo ago

The solution is that you as the nerd should be able to prove your skills once instead of every time. This is why I’ve personally never had an issue with Gatekeeper—one `spctl --master-disable` and a trip to the Settings menu and you’re done. Why can’t TCC work like this?

osjdiwnfiwjfi 5mo ago

> As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this As a self proclaimed complete nerd I expect you to be insufferable about this—lo and behold... Let’s not pretend these security practices have no use, please. This “I’m such a greybeard, screw modernity” playacting is so tiresome it’s not even quaint any longer.

m463 5mo ago

Wait until they add a captcha so AI can't do it for you.