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

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1183 points robenkleene | 3 comments | 20 Oct 20 15:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.625s | source
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AnonHP ◴[20 Oct 20 16:21 UTC] No.24839212[source]▶
I trust Apple a lot more than I trust Google or Facebook, but this clamping down of the Mac without options for power users while officially stating that the Mac will remain a Mac is alarming and distasteful on the part of Apple.

With the transition to Apple’s own chips looming, it seems like the days of “a Mac is a personal computer and not an app console like an iPhone or iPad” will be over by the middle of this decade. All Apple devices locked down completely and Apple decides the limits of what users can do on devices. This model made some sense for mobile (where restrictions were gradually removed or workarounds provided), but the Mac is going in reverse.

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1. userbinator ◴[20 Oct 20 19:43 UTC] No.24841585[source]▶
Apple's authoritarian control-freak mentality has been around since the original Macintosh of the 80s. It was only a coincidence that moving to x86 opened up some freedom. Now it's just moving in the same direction Apple always was.
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2. Wowfunhappy ◴[20 Oct 20 21:14 UTC] No.24842404[source]▶
I'm not entirely sure what's leading you to this conclusion. The original Macintosh had no privileges system and let apps write to random bits of memory. It was quite problematic for multitasking, in fact.
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3. userbinator ◴[20 Oct 20 23:58 UTC] No.24843566[source]▶
The original Macintosh had no privileges system and let apps write to random bits of memory

Neither did the PCs of the time, but the difference becomes obvious when you actually try to write an app: PC magazines were filled with BASIC and Asm listings (to be entered with DEBUG), both of which could be immediately used on an IBM PC with DOS, whereas to even start creating --- or for that matter, modifying --- software for the Macintosh was pretty much a non-starter for everyone who didn't want to actually invest plenty of $$$ in it.

Documentation on the system details is barely available (there's Inside Macintosh, but that pales in comparison to the IBM PC Technical Reference series --- the latter including full BIOS source code and schematics, even for the monitor and hard drive), and of course the PC was far more expandable. Apple wanted the whole stack locked down from the beginning.