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Comment by comboy | Hacker News Reader

Give me a good reason why defaults chosen by a macOS user would be more secure than those chosen by a security team working full time on developing the system.

This article isn't even that bad if you are willing to make your system less practical, but even here you are potentially making your system less secure as suggested in some other comments.

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Because the security team doesn't choose the defaults. They have some input, but other teams also have input and will cause settings to be enabled that have negative security consequences. E.g. "tell Apple everytime you connect to a wifi network to check for captive portals".

Because the security team's goal is MacOS as a whole, and not your individual computer. So they have an incentive to enable things like automatic bug reports that harm your personal security but contribute to the overall security (not to mention usability) of the MacOS ecosystem.

Just one example: In Safari, Open 'safe' files after downloaded is enabled by default …

(Yep, 'safe' files, not safe files, it's almost like a long-running joke by some Safari developer.)

Thanks for pointing that out! I can't believe I missed that!

Because security and usability are inherently at odds, and Apple has always erred on the side of usability, until the security downsides are simply to great to ignore. This has been the pattern for every single security improvement in Mac OS X.

If you understand the tradeoffs, you can do a wide variety of things to massively increase the inherent security of your Mac by changing system and app configurations.

You're putting the macOS team on a pedestal. Accounts I read elsewhere are it's a pretty barebones crew and I bet there are many components sitting unmaintained release to release with bad defaults to boot.

macOS is pretty secure by default but there are some extra steps you can take towards improving on that regard, Apple itself has a bunch of very basic steps listed here: https://help.apple.com/machelp/mac/10.12/index.html#/mh11389

Why do you expect somebody to persuade you not to be blase about security? If enjoy playing in the street, knock yourself out.

a security team working full time on developing the system

They've missed a few things. This is a memorable one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800676

Of course, that was a bug, not an explicit choice to favor usability over security.

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