Comment by ImprovedSilence | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ImprovedSilence | Hacker News Reader

ImprovedSilence

While I can't say much bad about Gatekeeper (yet), I can't help but feel this article is a bit scare-mongery (" As Macs enjoy increased popularity, they become a more attractive target to identity thieves and other criminals. Sooner or later, bad people ruin every nice thing. It’s an immutable law of humanity.") And I think the author takes a scary turn, in that he grows used to the loving walls of the closed garden. Just the quote("You can let anything run on your system, whether or not it is signed. This is the Mac OS of today. It’s like having a jailbroken iPhone.") makes it feel like a walled garden of ios is the norm, not a computer where you have full root access, and undoubtedly, that kind of sentence has the average computer user thinking "omg!, you mean my computer is out in the wild, just like a jailbroken phone, that sounds dangerous!". If this starts to become the prevailing viewpoint, it's lights out, free and open world.

[Edit]: Obligatory Ben Franklin quote: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

This feature isn't for us. Playing Captain Hindsight and telling a regular user "you shouldn't have opened that suspicious attachment" doesn't get their data back.

Put simply, a computer is a dangerous tool in inexperienced hands, no different than a table saw or a gun. A user has the ability to do serious damage to themselves, by destroying or leaking personal information; adding a reasonable safety feature that is activated by default is not an infringement of your freedom when you have the ability to disable it trivially.

Now, if we're talking the App Store, then I agree with you completely. iOS should behave exactly like Mountain Lion, and if I had my druthers, the level of vendor lock-in they employ on that platform would be considered anti-competitive and illegal. If it turns out that Gatekeeper is merely a stepping stone to similarly walling off the Mac ecosystem, then I suppose I will have to eat my words.

For anyone who manages "IT" for their relatives, I'm sure they'll upgrade to Mountain Lion and lock down the application execution to "App Store and Signed Only" right away.

Some people have a talent for getting malware on anything.

I'd actually like a setting that says "Install nothing, change nothing, bloody leave it all alone" for my Dad's computer.

That'd be nice but the "App Store Only" option should be pretty damn close.

Um no one is giving up any liberty. Apple is sheltering the uneducated until they are more learned. That is all.

If in five years I can only run apps on my Mac that come from the App Store then I'll eat crow but I'd bet everything I have on that not happening which is why I am a iOS and Mac developer.

see my reply to beatle below.

I understand. Without talking to the author directly we'll never know if he especially crafted it to be received that way.

Personally I feel this is just the authors genuine opinion/enthusiasm for this topic coming out on paper. I think he believes (just like I do) that this should be the "norm" and is a correct step forward. I see this as how I would have a conversation with my parents and explain to them why Mountain Lion is going to be so great for them. Obviously I would be crafting the conversation to lead them towards this being the "norm" because I think it should.

But again I am bias because I basically agree with the author whole-hardily.

I don't think the fear is entirely unjustified. I always wonder, in the back of my mind, if the thing I'm downloading from a developer's site is the real thing or some kind of trojan impostor that's been shunted into place.

We depend on the "take one for the herd" principle where the first few people to get stung by the trojan will alert others and the app can be taken down. Usually this is quick enough to make the viability of this kind of attack limited, but can we truly depend on that?

Code signing not for DRM purposes but for identifying the vendor is a big deal. Most Linux distributions make a point of validating the MD5 or SHA1 hash of the contents, yet on OS X most just download and open without really thinking.

The "liberty" you complain about sacrificing is only one click away.

absolutely. no idea why you are being voted down.

No one's taking away your freedom to use Windows or Linux.

True, and I don't believe Apple is taking my freedom away with Gatekeeper (yet. Always be wary of slippery slopes though). The point I'm trying to make is that I think the article was written in a crafty way, so as to alter what it's readers consider the "norm" and/or "right" as far as open vs closed ecosystems go.

I honestly think gatekeeper could be a good thing, and I would like to see a similar system be used to help open up ios. As it also appears that ios and OSX will eventually end up as the same entity (which I also think will be a good thing).

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