It also means Tor can no longer exist on the Mac. What a sad day for privacy.
What, are they working with someone? Five eyes? China? Spain? The Soviet Block?
Honestly, this is either utter imbecility or straight ill-will. There are no greys here. At all. When you do a think like this either you are stupid or you DO know the risks and are OK.
Great: now people in Hong-Kong cannot use Big Sur because they should be afraid of the apps they are using.
https://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/x86_harmful.pdf
[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/security/uefi-firmware-overv...
> The primary use of the ME is audio and video copyright protection on Mac computers that have only Intel-based graphics.
I dont now why. this is has been apple's stated position for a long time and the primary reason they are moving to ARM for the Mac, to make them more iDevice like, meaning you do not own the computer, they do, and you can only use it in a manner they (Apple) allows and bless.
Apple has been moving away form the professional / hacker market for a long time, they want to sell to normal consumers and could give a shit less about the pro or hacker market.
As for "you don't own your computer, they do", what it translates to is: "The OS places certain restrictions that work and make it safer for the large majority of users, but might not give full tinkering abilities to everybody". Which you never have (full tinkering ability) in a closed source OS, anyway.
While "we bypass firewalls for our domains" can be thought of in the same vein ("we think it's better and safer for most users to work this way, and leads to less head-scratching why X Apple service doesn't work etc"), it's not exactly the same.
Apple can go towards the "no tinkering direction, it's a device that just works", without disallowing preventing user firewalls from blocking Apple domains (provided of course the user understands that by blocking them they get no iCloud and other services).
>Apple has been moving away form the professional / hacker market for a long time, they want to sell to normal consumers and could give a shit less about the pro or hacker market.
On the other hand, the pro market (video, music, graphics, office, programming, writing, data analysis, etc) shouldn't have workflow issues with what Apple did, and the hacker market is small (and has never been a target market).
There is a HUGE difference between passive secure defaults, which a normal user will never change, and active blocks / overrides that can not be removed.
An example of this is iphone vs android store policy, by default on Android you can not install untrusted APK's or other stores, however inside the phone there is a simply way to disable this block. This is an example of a passive secure default. Where on iPhone it is simply impossible to disable this block
One OS (android) is respecting your ownership rights while protecting the normal users, the other (iOS) is asserting their ownership over the device.
Surely you can see the difference
it is clear that apple intends to bring this type of Active Ownership control to the Mac ARM platform, this is just the first step, a warning shot if you will, of what is to come
Yes. That's why I think while this change is OK as a default, it's problematic to not be overridable -- and even if it was just a default it should be communicated clearly as a change, so those affected (e.g. people relying on VPN under some regime) know about them.
Those people are not the typical user case, but it's an important consideration still.
>An example of this is iphone vs android store policy, by default on Android you can not install untrusted APK's or other stores, however inside the phone there is a simply way to disable this block. This is an example of a passive secure default. Where on iPhone it is simply impossible to disable this block
One problem with this duality is that people will disable the block, and then complain plus have their info/data and those of others compromised etc, when they install malware at the first BS prompt that tells them to do so (to get some cool new game or some pirated stuff).
That is, it's not just those "knowing what they do" that will bypass those kind of defaults....
Apple chose to go with the "Most people don't know what they're doing, and if we allow it they will do it anyway", which is a defensible position. You use their OS knowing that they do that.
But this change now, was not the same kind or communicated as well.
>it is clear that apple intends to bring this type of Active Ownership control to the Mac ARM platform, this is just the first step, a warning shot if you will, of what is to come
If "what is to come" is a machine that "just works", has no malware, but has to get its software from the App Store and/or notarized by Apple, I'm fine with it. And hundreds of millions will probably also be.
Apple was never about tinkerers and customizations, they were always about cohesive, all-in-one, curated -- and that's ever since the Apple II.
It's not their fault that people who don't like this model feel like they have to still stay with Apple.
It's not 1999 anymore. Those days if they broke into your computer or if you got a virus you would lose some useless files and a few hours/day to reinstall your Windows. Nowadays you can lose a lot, and with working from home etc becoming more the norm, even more so...
It is also revisionist history to say "Apple was never about tinkerers and customizations", Apple was born out of the "tinkers" market, and did infact become popular pre-iphone days due to this hacker mentality, to deny this is to deny actual history
Further your comment it it "not being 1999" anymore and if your system becomes infected to the point wher you need to "reinstall windows" you lose alot simply because you are working from home..
I fail to see the connection, today there are far better tools on both windows and make to backup and restore systems.
For windows with OneDrive unless you have a massive amount of custom apps to install it is litterally just logging in to any other win10 computer and connecting your OneDrive to that computer and you have all you files
If you do not want to use Cloud services, Free Agents like Veeam for Windows empower users to backup and restore a complete computer is just a few minutes.
Also to claim mac is "Virus free" is moronic, and implies a level of security that is not really warranted, Mac like Linux is security through obscurity, Windows still has a 90+% market share, so of course threat actors will target windows more. Apple Mac is not target simply because there is not enough people to justify the investment.
As Mac's have become more popular, the number of threats have increased, and has shown Apple is not this secure enclave simply because they are Apple, they are secure simply because no one cares enough to target the platform,
I was there in the pre-iPhone days, and Apple was never about the "hacker mentality".
In the early days (and up to now) it was all about "computers for the rest of us" (as the slogan famously said, which is also what the 1984 ad was about -- freeing computing from being a serious/enterprise/business affair, not about hacking ideal - the target was IBM and the PC).
During the Jobs-ousted era (Scully etc), it was mostly about selling expensive boxes to vertical markets (printing, design, and so on).
Their first popular post-Jobs products were the all-in-one iMac, the powerbooks, and of course, the iPod. And they always insisted on the vertical integration (they make the hardware and OS/basic software) - with the brief pre-Jobs exception of the Mac-clones, which nearly killed the company.
>I fail to see the connection, today there are far better tools on both windows and make to backup and restore systems.
It's not about backing up and restoring, it's about third parties getting access to your documents, data, personal pics and videos, account passwords, files, etc -- which today are a much larger and more important part of your life and business than it ever was.
>Also to claim mac is "Virus free" is moronic, and implies a level of security that is not really warranted
I didn't claim it, but now that you said, I will: Mac is, if not virus free, effectively virus free, and can be even more so. There has not been any major outbreak for the Mac (tons for Windows). The biggest outbreaks were confined to sub-10% of users, and were invariably trojans, not viruses (users had to actively run them).
>Mac like Linux is security through obscurity, Windows still has a 90+% market share, so of course threat actors will target windows more. Apple Mac is not target simply because there is not enough people to justify the investment.
That's an old fable that doesn't hold. In the 90s, when the Mac (Mac OS then, pre-OS X) had 2% to Windows 98%, it still had tons of viruses.
And of course iOS has 0 or no viruses and malware, whereas Android has a ton, and there are not only close (30-40% to 60%) but also richer people on the iOS phone side to justify resources. It's just more secure, for various reasons (and no side-loading is one):
https://www.pandasecurity.com/en/mediacenter/mobile-security....
Wait what?? Are you serious? Please tell me you are not serious
Man are you in an Apple PR bubble if you believe that, iOS most certainly has been impacted by viruses, malware and vulnerabilities
>>That's an old fable that doesn't hold. In the 90s, when the Mac (Mac OS then, pre-OS X) had 2% to Windows 98%, it still had tons of viruses
I am not sure what you are attempting to say here? your implying Mac OS had a ton of viruses, if so I am not sure why you said "still had tons of viruses"
If you are talking about win 98 having viruses this does not refute my statement at all, as in Win98 days, as today then and now Windows was the vast majority (90+%) of computers.
Well, since you're outside the PR bubble, I'll be eagerly awaiting for your examples of viruses in iOS devices. I'll be patient.
Spyware you'll find a few (they exist in any system when you can't trust the developer 100% -- even Facebook app functions as malware, in the sense that it got data it shouldn't), that are stopped when found out, exactly due to developer certificates. No malware in the wild (virus, trojans, etc) infecting iOS devices, due to no sideloading and sandboxing.
While at it, also refute the "50 to 1" Android to iOS malware ratio as given in the post -- and that's from an antivirus vendor:
https://www.pandasecurity.com/en/mediacenter/mobile-security...
You're serious and I'm not after all. And you're also outside the bubble, so you'll have access to plenty of material...
Go read the feature list of Copland to see how much "tinkers" market they cared about.
Making apps is not super profitable, most apps don't make enough revenue to support even 1 full time developer.
If they turn the Mac into a toy computer that developers can't use then it will affect the app ecosystem.
Just like NeXT didn't care about UNIX other than having a checkmark on bullet point list for the companies looking out for UNIX workstations.
Yes:
Apple canceled their plans to fully encrypt iCloud data after the FBI complained:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
In the Vault 7 leaks, Little Snitch was something specifically mentioned as being difficult to circumvent. Now, the ability to bypass it is baked into the OS:
https://blog.obdev.at/little-snitch-on-vault-7/
They moved iCloud keys to Chinese servers so the CCP could continue their surveillance:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
During the protests in Hong Kong, Apple took down apps that let people crowdsource tracking of police:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/technology/apple-hong-kon...
Also very relevant that VPNs seem to be illegal in China.
And Apple forced the hand of Telegram to shut down the channels revealing the names of Belarus police.
How illegal are they currently? When I lived there, they were illegal too, but still everybody would use them. There was always a difference between "illegal by law" and "really illegal".
> while China does have data privacy laws, there are broad exceptions when authorities investigate criminal acts, which can include undermining communist values, “picking quarrels” online, or even using a virtual private network to browse the Internet privately.
There is no meaningful tor under those conditions.
It makes no sense for Tor to use those APIs since they're designed for other use cases.
Imagine you open Tor in your mac, Apple will send a request with Date, Time, Computer, ISP, City, State and Application Hash through the open internet for everyone that listens.
That by itself is not very interesting but if you combine that with all the other data hoarding that happens it can trace back to you.
For the Tor Browser, the developer ID used with OCSP is:
The Tor Project, Inc (MADPSAYN6T)
Also that's only OCSP which runs often. Gatekeeper also runs, though only the first time each new executable is run. Gatekeeper does tell Apple the hash of the application. That will show up each time you run it after updating to a new version.
The stuff about street address etc is wrong, but not completely wrong. Because the request is sent when you open the application, as a side effect it reveals your approximate location (to anyone third-party eavesdroppers not just Apple) and an accurate timestamp, of the moment when you opened Tor.
Of course anyone eavesdropping nearby can detect the Tor traffic itself. However, only on the paths used to the Tor exit node. Separate from the Tor traffic, Apple and any routers along the path to Apple (e.g. "great firewall") can identify devices running Tor from far away, even if they don't have direct evidence of Tor traffic from those devices. I think it quite likely that CCP (among others) will be logging these OCSP requests at the great firewall already.
Here's a "cleared up" version of the story from https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/16/21569316/apple-mac-ocsp-... :
> the data sent to Apple’s OCSP server contains information relating to an app’s developer but not the app itself. It adds that Apple’s Gatekeeper service can send the hash of an executable, but that this is separate to OCSP and happens over an encrypted connection. Apple’s own support page notes that Gatekeeper uses “an encrypted connection that is resilient to server failures.”
> In its updated support document, Apple makes clear that security checks it makes when authenticating software do not include a user’s Apple ID or device identity. The company also says it’s stopped logging IP addresses associated with the Developer ID certificate checks. “We have never combined data from these checks with information about Apple users or their devices,” writes the iPhone-maker. “We do not use data from these checks to learn what individual users are launching or running on their devices.”
It doesn’t send a text string of the developer ID. It sends the thumbprint for the certificate. That’s still some information that could be used indirectly to determine some apps that may be running, but you’d have to at least collect a mapping database by sampling common apps.
Most importantly, it doesn’t even try to explain what OSCP is. This is critical in order to understand the purpose. Without that, and with the other false or misleading info, it looks like this literally exists for the purpose of tracking your every move and what apps you use. But that isn’t what it is at all. It’s a good faith malware protection feature that has some potentially unwanted side effects that have privacy implications, and even those implications are substantially less than what is claimed.
There are legitimate privacy concerns with OSCP but I feel that it’s important to represent the situation accurately. This is an off the shelf revocation checking protocol that was implemented to the spec. We should pressure them to improve it (which sounds like it already happened, a very positive sign) but it’s unhelpful to paint them as villains over it for following a standard and not even keeping any of the data that is sent back.
You’re correct that the notarization check has a hash, but that’s not what he was talking about. Also, that’s sent once and encrypted I believe.
There are various third party add-ons for various systems that do try to funnel "ALL" traffic through Tor in various ways. ORBot for Android tries to act like a VPN for the phone. Outboard hardware like the Pi-hole will try to put everything on a subnet through Tor. Tor-centric OSes like Whonix and TAILS put all of their traffic through Tor. You can hack something up to do it on vanilla Linux.
... but so far as I know, there has never been anything that tried to do it on MacOS. Maybe I just don't know about some weird hack that's available, but even if there is one, it's not part of Tor proper.
It's also not something anybody should ever have relied on anyway, because trying to "act like a VPN", on a general-purpose OS that's not cooperating, is prone to be leaky regardless of the OS. As long as programs running in an OS can find out the system's "real" IP address, they can leak it, so if you're serious about containing non-cooperative programs, you need to deprive them of that information.
The Tor Browser doesn't do any that. It just sends the traffic from the browser app itself over Tor using SOCKS, and Apple has not broken that here.
What Apple is doing is obnoxious and unacceptable and yet another reason never, ever to use an Apple product for anything... but it has zero impact on Tor.