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Comment by rednum | Hacker News Reader

Another fun fact about this system: something changed in how the binaries are evaluated and one VST plugins I've downloaded months ago was marked as malware. The plugin is quite popular in community so I think it's unlikely it contains actual malicious code (in fact I've contacted the developer and he said he has done some fixes for Apple's security policies recently). Imagine my shock when I open an old project in Ableton and suddenly some sounds just don't work. This really sucks, I don't want to worry about whether my music will work five or ten years from now (I can imagine I may I want to remix some old piece). I suppose I can err on side of safety and export all tracks to wav.

However, it's not an isolated problem. It feels that every other week something happens that undermines my confidence in Macbook as good device for making music.

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It's been good practice for a long time to "freeze" or "render" the tracks out after the song is finished so that the song can be loaded without the plugins.

True, but this shouldn't be necessary in response to anti-consumer behavior.

This is not anti-consumer behavior. Consumers are, overall, protected when they can verify the source of an application or extension on their computers. Their freedom may be limited but it's not a black-and-white "this is anti-consumer".

Some signatures are invalidated due to business disputes on entirely different platforms (Epic dispute on iOS, signatures invalidated, or threatened to be before court order prevented it, on OS X, for no security reason).

Epic violated the Terms of Use for their developer agreement which applies to all platforms. They knew that and they violated it willingly. The court order only prevented it temporarily to reduce the damages that may be incurred and until a determination was made in the initial case.

That is not anti-consumer.

Well even if Epic are the bad guys by violating the ToU willingly, it still impacts the user. As a user I don't want my apps (which I depend on) to stop working, because of a business disagreement.

Revoking signatures and disabling the apps on user devices to protect your business model is definitely anti-consumer in my book.

You could easily see Apple revoking signatures because of DMCA claims. Even faulty ones, like the claim RIAA made against youtube-dl on GitHub.

Of course it impacts the user... And if Epic was found doing something illegal and was shut down or bankrupted, that would also impact the user. Your over-simplification that it's a "business disagreement" is disingenuous and incomplete. The signature revocation system you're claiming is simply to "protect their business model" is the same system that allows Apple to immediately shut down any malware that makes its way into the App Store inadvertently. It's the same system that's been used in the past to protect users from private key leaks.

The only anti-consumer behavior in your situation came from Epic who knowingly violated the rules as a PR stunt.

> The only anti-consumer behavior in your situation came from Epic who knowingly violated the rules as a PR stunt.

Exactly. Never forget, it was Epic who threw their users under the bus, not Apple.

Epic expected you to be a soldier in their fight. They expected you to make a sacrifice you were not willing to make.

That's entirely on Epic.

I was not claiming the revocation system only has the purpose of protecting Apple's business model, but its one of the purposes.

Even though I agree that in the Epic case, most of the blame lies with Epic, I still have a problem with Apple: the signature revocation system is used for more things than removing malware. I think it is user hostile and anti consumer to disable installed apps on other grounds, because the users might be dependent on them.

I'd like to be able to run programs and apps on my machine that are not Apple-approved.

> I'd like to be able to run programs and apps on my machine that are not Apple-approved.

I thought you could anyway. You would right-click the app in Finder and choose Open — from then on, it would continue to open.

Or is that a different mechanism?

Apple promised it would only be used for security related stuff on desktop. I wouldn't want my desktop audio project to break because the VSTs were unsigned due to an iOS app business dispute. That's anti-consumer.

I agree that it's anti-consumer. I disagree that it's Apple that's being anti-consumer. The company developing the app would be anti-consumer for knowingly violating the Terms of Use to try and pull a PR stunt.

That's often done for producing a static performance and mix for distribution.

But when returning to a digital musical work months or years later, oftentimes the idea is to improve or otherwise rework it ... just as live bands do constantly. A non-working essential plug-in (filter, synth, VCO, whatever) might make that much more difficult.

One of the biggest headaches in computer music-making is how much time fighting the tech takes away from the creative process. Noone needs their OS to be adding to their distress. Let alone switching serial-port designs every few years (obsoleting trusted and often expensive equipment).

I assume you upgraded OS, in which case it's annoying but not unusual that plugins stop working.

A machine that's used for making professional music should not be upgraded or connected to the internet. If it's for a hobby... I think we will have to live with the compromise if we want to have the latest security fixes and connect to the internet.

>should not be upgraded

Most DAW-makers are constantly upgrading their software. And they often obsolete their older versions to get in sync with new OS's. 'Keeping the old stuff' sometimes isn't an option.

Physical instruments keep working for decades ... but thanks to OS upgrades, valued digital hardware and/or software instruments (say by Opcode or Native) can be lost to stupid or cavalier changes. Anyone who's been making 'professional music' for long has been bitten many times.

Yes they are obviously upgrading their software because they need to make money and adding features and fixing bugs is a great way to do that.

The only solution to not having a broken music workstation is to never connect that machine to the internet and never update it. Physical instruments keep working for decades because...they are never connected to the internet and never updated.

Completely agree, except I'd say physical electronic instruments have a lifetime of about 20-30 years now. Several synths I own are now non- or half-working because of fading displays, broken floppy drives, power supplies and even chips going bad. The relentless churn of music computer software and hardware setups has also existed since the 80s. I guess it is probably worse for photo & video production.

>I don't want to worry about whether my music will work five or ten years from now

This is exactly what Apple has already done to the iTunes world, music you had a decade ago is suddenly inaccessible

Do you have an example of this?

> [...] music you had a decade ago is suddenly inaccessible

Music bought via iTunes doesn't have any DRM since 2009.

But even without DRM, if you go with the default settings and don't download your music locally, you lose access to it if they decide to remove it from their catalog. Same goes for movies/TV shows; I've had both disappear from my iTunes library at various points.

What is this referring to? Mine seems to work fine.

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