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Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

You're right, but Gatekeeper does something else: It marks the line in the sand. So long as that choice is there as an option in settings for me to make, Apple is in the right. If they ever take that choice away, and they start dictating what I can run or not run, they will have crossed that line, and lost me as a customer forever.

I think a lot of people think that Apple taking away that choice is inevitable. I don't think so- I think it would be completely out of character.

But if I'm wrong, I'm gone.

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It's a sensible feature, and there's no reasonable way to implement it without that settings option, and the options they've chosen make total sense.

I agree with you: not having the option would be very bad... but it's very unlikely they'll ever take the option away.

Why would they? The overwhelming majority of their users will never touch it.

Right now there is no need to take the option away. You are certainly correct about that.

Microsoft is going to soon start pushing its users to buy from its app store. I can see a future in which only 'trusted' programs can be run on new computers. Trusted here means programs approved by Apple/Microsoft and the national government of the country in which your computer resides.

I don't know how likely this would be but China seems to like to have a lot of control over the computing its citizens do.

Sure is handy for China how easy it is to get a keylogger installed on someone's computer, isn't it?

Yes. Unfortunately control of citizens' computing is one area that China leads in. Other national government appear to be envious of this control seek to emulate it.

I think you may be missing tptacek's point. Things like code signing make it harder for bad things to run without the user's permission.

If option 3 is removed then how is this so? It's not in Apple's interest right now to do this. In five years? Maybe China decides that in order to get access to its market Option 3 must not be available. Maybe Gatekeeper gets enhanced in the future.

Obviously this is hypothetical but given the trend toward national surveillance is it hard to imagine that this can happen?

I think he meant how easy it is now for China to install key loggers on, say, American computers.

I don't see how installing key loggers being easy is germane to whether or not enhancing Gatekeeper to delete unapproved programs is a future possibility.

I read the comment as being, "China's key logging exploits are evidence that it likes to control computing and it will seek to enhance this capability." The trend amongst world governments is to seek greater control of computing. I doubt this is going to stop with key logging software and won't be enhanced.

I guess I missed your point. In which case it seems you missed my point.

If only approved programs can run on a computer then it is quite easy to disable undesirable programs. There's obviously a kill switch involved. If social unrest gets too great then move Twitter clients to the unapproved list and they all get deleted. This would be a lot easier than installing key loggers and...what? remotely logging into 100 million computers to delete certain programs?

Things like Gatekeeper can in the future be extended and used to exert more control of computing. It may even be a requirement for all manufactured computers as we enter the surveillance state era.

> There's obviously a kill switch involved

False. It's already been reported that this is not the case. Gatekeeper uses, and clears, the quarantine flag, the thing (which already exists) that throws up the "BLAH is an application downloaded from the Internet. Safari downloaded this file today at 4:30PM" message the FIRST time you open an application. Since after the application is launched, the quarantine flag is cleared, you don't get prompted again, and the blacklist is not checked again either. So, whether it's malware, or some kind of "subversive" app the government wants to suppress, no apps that have previously been opened at least once will ever be prevented from running by Gatekeeper. And nobody ever said anything about deleting anything.

Furthermore, even after a developer key was blacklisted, apps loaded from disks such as CDs or USB drives don't get quarantine flag. Only files that came from the network.

I'm pretty sure if China wants a keylogger they just install a custom usb hub chip on the motherboard, repainted to match whatever was specced.

Now that is a deliciously diabolical plot. Infiltrate the hub supplier in Shenzhen, coerce the people that oversee parts deliveries in the appropriate wing of the facilities at Pegatron into not reporting a thing to Apple or other integrator clients, and let the trojan hardware filter into the market. The hubs are inert until they have a driver installed surreptitiously from a compromised copy of Baidu Desktop Search or QQ. No one would be any the wiser.

I'd order a tinfoil hat at this point but I don't know who might have interfered between the aluminum refinery and the sheeting facility.

Infiltrate the hub supplier? The hub supplier is probably already owned by the Chinese army, if my experience with other Chinese companies is correct.

"The overwhelming majority of their users will never touch it."

That's unless they want to install any app currently available on the Web that isn't signed. There is a lot of legacy software people keep using, even Mac users. I don't see that setting staying default for very long.

Not to mention DVD rippers and pirated copies of Office and Creative Suite.

There's no reason you couldn't sign a DVD ripping app; all that code signing will do is ensure that you are who you say you are. Since you don't have to distribute apps through the Mac App Store, you could sign up for a dev account, build your custom app, and distribute it however you want.

For tools like that, this could actually be a big benefit - it lends a sense of credibility. You wouldn't be able to distribute modified (read: backdoored) binaries, and if you did people would know who you were (at least, to some extent, and Apple could revoke your credentials so no one else would inadvertently run your software).

As for pirated software: I haven't seen a lot of actual 'cracks' lately; mostly it seems to be 'put in this serial plus set these hosts entries so it can't phone home' sort of thing. For app-modifying cracks, you'd have to disable this, but I'm not sure how common that is lately.

But one of the things Apple can now do is void you keys and make all the apps on people computer unusable at least as I understand it. So for legally dubious application this wouldn't be such a good idea.

Apple would likely revoke the certificate for the developer of a DVD ripper, simply to avoid the liability.

The way I understand it, one can override the setting on a per application basis by control-clicking an app and choosing "Open" _once_. I would hope that would make Apple sign those apps ins some way, bu I do not think they will, as they will not want to store the master key of doing that on the user's disk.

Also, apparently, all applications already installed get this magic applied automatically.

According to a screenshot the Macworld Hands-on (http://www.macworld.com/article/165407/2012/02/hands_on_with...) you can whitelist individual apps on the fly.

If that is the case, that's actually incredibly useful.

"The overwhelming majority of their users will never touch it."

Oh Thomas, Thomas, Thomas. You of all people should know the unimaginable power of porn and the incredibly stupid things people do in response to the promised delivery of the same.

I'm curious, what makes you say that taking away that choice is completely out of character when they've already done so on a different, more popular platform?

they never gave you that choice on iOS, so they never took it away, did they?

Never giving the choice in the first place is stronger, not weaker, than giving it and then taking it away.

I disagree. Pulling access to something you've come to depend on (especially, derive your livelihood from) is worse than never fostering that dependence in the first place.

I was aiming more at the idea that it would be out of character for Apple to completely restrict access to just certain sources of apps. If we're talking about whether Apple would take something away that people had come to rely upon, well, there's a whole long list of technologies I could list off to support the idea that they have no problem doing that....

Not arguing that they won't do it. Just that it's worse than never allowing something.

Well, that's why I said stronger, not worse.

I think it’s right to make very clear that Apple overstepping that line would be inexcusable and evil, or else they might think people would be ok with that. So a bit of outrage isn’t altogether a bad thing, really.

(Although it’s pretty obvious that acting like Apple already overstepped that line or will certainly overstep that line in the future is very childish.)

Shouldn't it work the same way for iOS, too? It seems Android is the only one who's allowing you you to make that choice. Neither iOS nor WP7 allow it.

What I'm curious about is how they'll present this to users who try to install an unsigned application the first time. Will they educate the user, and provide a way to get to the Settings and change it if they want? Or will they present it in such a way that 90% of users give up and assume the installer is broken.

Just as long as they don't present it the way Windows does - pretty much the same dialog boxes but one has a blue banner (signed) and one has a yellow banner (unsigned).

Remember that most Mac apps don't have an installer - they're self-contained, and installing consists of extracting the DMG and putting the app on your hard drive.

The notification will probably take the same form as the error message you get upon trying to launch a PowerPC app on 10.6 without Rosetta installed.

TO be fair, even apps without an installer will open a warning dialogue the first time it's actually run letting the user know this is an application that's "new" and hasn't been run before.

Also - as long as Apple makes it easy for developers to get signing keys, which seems to be their direction as far as OS X goes, there's no reason for developers to complain about it too much. Just sign your builds, and you probably avoid any warning message.

I don't necessarily think Gatekeeper is a bad thing, but I worry about the impact if Apple were to make the default setting for Gatekeeper be Mac-store-only. Having the option to install other software would be great, but such a move would further marginalize non-Apple-approved software in a huge way. Assuming a large portion of Mac users are not the type to lower default security settings, then that could have a severe impact on the way people think about software in the "wild".

Agreed on all points. I think it's far likelier that this form of tiered app access will make its way over to iOS eventually.

But will you be able to leave with your data? Or will it be locked in to iCloud?

iCloud is not a drive you store your data on. iCloud syncs data and changes between your devices. So you have local copies of a document on your iPhone and Mac. Make a change on your Mac and it will show up on the iPhone. Both devices have local copies. In other words you will always have your data.

The only things stored on iCloud are device backups and iTunes purchases.

In other words you will always have your data.

In what format? If addresses and mail are stored like Apple stores my iTunes metadata, I'll never get them back if I stop using Apple products.

I'm not sure about mail because I don't use it but you can export your contacts as a Vcard.

Addresses exportable as vcards, as noted above. Mail has export options for mail boxes and individual mails, plus icloud is using IMAP, so you should be able to export both from the server and the client.

iTunes metadata can be exported as an XML file.

To me it depends on what happens when you attempt to run the binary. If there is an override button which remembers that setting, fine. If not, to hell with Apple.

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