Hacker News Reader

Comment by dcchambers | Hacker News Reader

The second link seems like a massive problem for developers - but the tweet in that link has been deleted. What's actually happening?

If that were true, I couldn't just write some C, Rust, or Go code on my mac, compile it myself, and run the executable file because it's not signed?

There's got to be a way (developer mode?) to disable this, right?

Edit: Found some more info - only binaries that are compiled to run natively on ARM are affected (for now). Still seems like this will introduce some major inconvenience for developers/power-users.

https://eclecticlight.co/2020/08/22/apple-silicon-macs-will-...

View on HN

But at some point you'll _only_ be able to run ARM binaries. Rosetta2 will go away. Like how Rosetta went away for non-ARM Mac's, and now they can only run x86 binaries.

This is bad.

I seriously can't overstate how easy it is to sign a binary. You don't need an Apple Developer account, or an internet connection, or anything other than macOS and a working development environment. Just go into the Terminal and type:

> codesign -f -s - [path to binary]

Unless something has changed on Apple Silicon, that's it, you're done, the binary has a signature. It does not have a trusted signature, but you don't need one. I think it was just simpler to write the OS assuming all executables would have a signature.

Do you know whether this applies to everything which executes? If my build scripts create a build script and run it I guess that will be ok, but if my build scripts build a specialised parser (say, from C source) I need to add a step after linking to code sign the generated parser binary before using it? Is that about right?

Signing is only required for native code. If your parser is a native binary, it needs at least an ad-hoc signature on it before it will run.

That's definitely going to be fun to integrate into build systems.

> but you don't need one

Yet. Until this you didn't need a signature at all.

Have they announced that it’s temporary or is this an assumption? Obviously it goes away eventually, but going away in year 3 of a transition is a different beast than going away in year 10.

My personal thought - there's a hell of a lot more software written for x86 Mac than there ever was for PowerPC Macs. It would make sense to provide the transational layer for a longer amount of time.

That said, Apple has never been shy about aggressive transitions.

Yeah I have the same thought. On the other hand, SaaS and Electron were not really things back then. It's possible that if enough heavy workloads go into the cloud and basic ones just turn into wrapped web apps the actual underlying instruction set becomes irrelevant much faster.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com