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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

As an Apple user of 10 years: I had no idea macos phones home like this.

That's one potential issue, if you have privacy concerns. But the real problem here is that there's a blatant bug in the phone-home code that causes apps to crash if Apple's servers have a problem.

“Bug” is an unverified assumption. For all we know this could be a designed outcome.

Then it's a bug in the design.

I would accept "flaw", "incorrect choice", or "mistake". But if they considered it, and chose this path, knowing full well this would happen, that's not a bug.

simply doing “if server does not respond, don’t check anything” would be bigger flaw in design because that would mean just modify hosts file to localhost or something and the security check would be worked around.

This is how you could make Photoshop free back in the day. Add their stuff to /etc/hosts and voila

Modern Adobe cracks are note that different in nature

But Macs already work fine with no internet connection, and apparently modifying the hosts file does resolve this problem.

Doesn't this bigger design flaw you describe apparently exist? I (and many others) did exactly that to get our machines responsive again, ocsp.apple.com 127.0.0.1 in the hosts file.

I don't understand what you mean.

No, I don’t think you should just dismiss the privacy issue. It seems every time I launch an app, MacOS tells Apple. That’s also a REAL problem — and I guess I won’t be buying a Mac again unless the feature can be turned off.

Not every time, just the first time an untrusted app wants to run. And there is no information in it but a hash.

Apple has the db of apps matching the hash.

What you said is like saying nothing except a social security number is used to identify you, as if that wasn't linked to the rest of the info about you.

Not in this case. This particular thread is about any app that was not an Apple app having problems launching, regardless of how many times have been launched before. It has revealed that actually every opening of any application phones home.

I’m not dismissing it, just pointing out that it’s completely ancillary to a bug that causes programs to crash.

I like this piece to summarize situation:

https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/

It's a certificate check.

I knew and didn't care. If you care, you're going to be real upset when you look at your other alternatives.

That said, I don't think many people here actually care. I firmly believe that most of the people on this site just like to shit on Apple, because they prefer that to trust their privacy to an Advertising company.

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