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Comment by sbuk | Hacker News Reader

The security and privacy features benefit the majority, of which you clearly are not, so there is an escape hatch for you; turn off SIP. Just don't disable it for typical users.

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Yea, I'm really not sure how this is a "misery". System processes are protected for typical users to limit the blast radius of malware, among other reasons. If you are capable of debugging system processes you should be able to manage to:

Restart macOS, holding ⌘+R. Open Terminal. Type `csrutil disable`. Restart macOS again.

For some things though that's just Step 1 of many. Still doable but too much of a pain.

That’s like telling me to remove the front door of my house rather than letting me have a key to unlock it.

True, but giving us a key might jeopardize future revenue streams where we have to pay for the privilege of developing software on Apple platforms. You already get a degraded developer experience for iOS if you don't bribe Apple with a Developer Program subscription.

Not just iOS. Notarizing apps for macOS requires payment too.

HN has been predicting a future that you could only install apps through the Mac App Store since it was introduced in 2011.

Any day now…

We will see alt app stores on the iphone before we see macOS match those predictions.

What would be a suitable key in your analogy?

Super-root?

But as far as I'm aware the reasoning is that if there's a way to access something from a normal user account (with admin privileges) it can be abused somehow.

Maybe a "key" would be the ability to boot/log in to a special mode with SIP enabled. Disabling/enabling it approximates this, but as far as I know an update will generally destroy your changes because Apple will just overwrite everything.

The suitable key would be to allow users to grant their own fine-grained entitlements to applications using their own self-signed certificate. The process should be suitably involved and complex enough to scare off regular users who may be attempting to do it under the direction of a third party (who may be trying to trick them) but it should be available to users who know what they’re doing.

Those resources are still owned by the root user so regular apps can't change them. Turning off SIP gives you something more like a regular linux system. The problem was when a normal user is prompted to type their password by an application, they simply do it granting the program root access so Apple decided regular users shouldn't be able to accidentally do this. If you need that access, you have to reboot in recovery mode to turn off the safety rails.

You can do that today on macOS? Build XNU with support for respecting your self-signed cert and then boot it

Why not enable easier override for specific scenarios? Turning off completely feels like a bad outcome

It already allows to turn off only a part of it.

But I don't want that. That's like taking the gate instead of adding a configurable ACL.

Turning off any of SIP is largely isomorphic to turning it all off

Then iOS apps stop working, right? The DRM regime requires SIP to be enabled.

Stallman was right about "treacherous computing".

This has nothing to do with iOS.

macOS now has support for iOS apps, but only if SIP is enabled and their DRM/"trusted" computing regime is active.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/if-you-disable-sip-all-...

Turning off SIP means you can’t run iOS apps on macOS. This sucks.

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