Apple's apps bypass firewalls like LittleSnitch and LuLu on macOS Big Sur

"You don't need kernel extensions, we'll provide APIs for you! We won't abuse the power that gives us, promise!"

...and now Apple has altered the deal and we must pray they do not alter it further. Disgusting. Predictable, expected, unsurprising -- but still disgusting.

Tim Cook's Apple Inc is really a nightmare. Sure we have sleek shiny laptops and devices that are amazingly powerful but at what cost? I still haven't found a trackpad as good as MagicTrackpad sadly otherwise I'd ditch the MacBook Pro.

To be fair to Apple though, it's their OS, they can do what they want and we agree every time we update MacOS or iOS. It's crazy to me that we basically only have 3 phone device choices, 2.15 environment choices (OS wise... Linux Desktop is crap, but getting better), and only 2 choices in GPU's, CPU's, etc...

What can we do about this?

What is distinct about the direction of Tim Cook's Apple Inc compared to any previous Apple Inc?

Jobs' Apple created technologies which have rooted deeply in POSIX standards and standard UNIX* conventions. If you knew UNIX(Linux/BSD/whatever), you can find the same data streams on the same places.

OS was obscure but, predictable. Different but, familiar. It had kernel extensions, logs and devices. Nothing was extremely obfuscated. It was a UNIX device but, shinier.

Now it feels like a glorified iOS box with more transparent walls. You can see some gears but can't touch them. There are only limited interfaces to some of those, which you can touch remotely but, not alter completely.

I wonder what will happen to my EXT drivers from Paragon though.

I intend this with kindness: normally I don’t nitpick on grammar and punctuation, but you’ve got a repeated error here that’s easily corrected. Generally, you want to break your sentences with commas _before_ usage of “but”: “He wanted to buy a pen, but the store had run out.”

If you’re a native speaker, the comma goes where you’d naturally have a brief pause in speech.

If you’re not a native speaker, it may be helpful to remember that the clause with “but” should be able to be removed & what remains should still be a valid sentence: “He wanted to buy a pen.”, not “He wanted to buy a pen but.”