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Comment by crimsontech | Hacker News Reader

The settings in MacOS have become increasingly more frustrating. Especially security or privacy permissions given to applications.

I installed a capture card recently that needed a kernel extension and after agreeing a confirmation box to install the extension I couldn’t find anywhere in the settings to remove it. In the end I just deleted the file and rebooted.

I had Teams in the browser ask if it could access files in my Downloads directory which I mistakenly agreed to, this took a good ten minutes to find and revoke and I can’t remember off the top of my head where the setting even was.

A lot of this is down to more granular privacy and security settings but it’s difficult to find the settings you are looking for.

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It’s worse than this sadly, at least in Ventura.

I previously gave access to an app to access removable storage (because there was no more granular way to just give the app access for a single folder - which is a serious freaking defect if anyone from Apple is reading this - that’s just plain bad), did some editing, then revoked the access.

The problem is the access wasn’t revoked and it could still access the whole drive. Checked the settings pane - definitely no access to removable drives (and no full disk access), went back to app and it could still access.

Went through tcc on the command line and it showed that the access was revoked but still it persisted reboots.

In the end I had to completely reset the machine and start from scratch just to revoke that drive access.

macOS really needs another Snow Leopard “no new features” release.

> macOS really needs another Snow Leopard “no new features” release.

This has always been a myth. Snow Leopard had some massive changes "under the hood", and OS X 10.6.0 was very buggy, as can be seen by the release notes for 10.6.1, 10.6.2, etc.

What people remember fondly about Snow Leopard was in actuality the 2 full years of bug fixes that occurred after its release.

What Apple needs to do is end the yearly major OS release cycle. It doesn't leave enough time to fix the bugs before Apple engineers start working on new features for the next release.

Focusing on changes "under the hood" instead of flashy new user-visible features was the entire point of that release, it's not a myth at all.

> Focusing on changes "under the hood" instead of flashy new user-visible features was the entire point of that release

Yes.

> it's not a myth at all.

The myth is that no flashy new user-visible features meant that Snow Leopard was a "stable" release. It wasn't a stable release, any more so than any other major new OS version. Snow Leopard became stable over time, after many minor bug fix releases.

Note the specific words I was replying to: "macOS really needs another Snow Leopard “no new features” release."

macOS doesn't need any new major OS updates. Snow Leopard didn't help. Mac OS X 10.6.0 was in fact much buggier than Mac OS X 10.5.8 preceding it. What macOS needs is a long series of minor bug fix releases.

This is crucial: as soon as you acknowledge that 10.6.0 was much buggier than 10.5.8, the whole idea that "we need another Snow Leopard" goes out the window.

The old saying was you never run a X.0 release. You let all of the other "testers" to run it, and wait for the X.1 release to follow. I've even seen it annotated to not running an even version number.

X.1 isn't so great either.

Yeah, each OS version is much better a year after release than at release. If they had a two year release cycle, you could spend most of your time on a stable version of the OS as long as you weren't installing the new major version right away. With a one year cycle, you're upgrading to the new buggy thing shortly after the previous one got to a decent state.

Unfortunately as an iOS developer just not upgrading isn't an option - Xcode drops support for the previous version of macOS a few months after the release, and submitting to the app store requires using recent versions of Xcode. You can lag at most about a year behind.

Wait....

What hostile application is running on your computer that you fear about giving drive access as opposed to folder access? Uh.. So if you do.... What will that app do? Why are you using such an app then?

Isn't the idea like if you install an application on your own machine, it shouldn't be hostile to you and the app is trusted so why should I "fear" that the app has some access?

One that’s been at least mildly annoying to me personally is that there’s no way to fly elk the OS that a “removable” drive isn’t. My chained to my desk Mac Studio has 4TB of external aSSD (some old stuff, Time Machine, but also where I tore big stuff like AI models since I only have the base Studio with 512G

Constant pop up’s every time a new app wants to look at those files… so get a n admin populists that just be felt with. It’s not a huge deal for a single instance, but when it’s coming up 4 or 5 times a day…

Ill I want is a per-volume checkbox “treat as internal”.

Is “to fly elk” a slang phrase I’ve never heard or just some weird autocorrect?

[Edit] Either way, I’m gonna use it from now as a synonym for “tell [someone]”. Thank you for the inspiration!

Was going to ask that.

I took it to mean "Gaslight" (in this case, gaslight the OS to believe that a removable disk is not removable).

"tell", if you can believe it. HN uses such tiny fonts on mobile it's basically impossible for me to proofread on mobile.

This sounds like a bad pattern (I posted about this above).

“Mark as internal” seems like a really crude fudge when the real problem is you can’t give access to single directories rather than a whole drive. Also a “don’t remind me again” option on the external drive pop-up.

In Linux you can Mount a folder as a drive so maybe it’s possible on Mac too?

Although it’s an annoying workaround.

I mean, you can do a lot of things (osx-fuse etc.) - but it really feels like it should be supported by the Operating System as a standard feature. The permission system just makes very little sense being as broad as it is.

The other thing is that on Linux that would probably work consistently once it's done whereas on macOS you'd always be waiting for it to break, or it would need to be set up again after every update etc.

Sadly, on macOS it always feels like you're fighting against Apple to use your machine how you want - a certain amount of the bad experience feels like dark patterns because you didn't pay Apple's through-the-roof storage prices in the first place. The same is true of how Mac's limit external displays in software but that's a whole other kettle of fish.

> because you didn't pay Apple's through-the-roof storage prices in the first place

Are Apple’s prices “through the roof”? They seem comparable/equal to Google’s

And what dark patterns exist if you only use the free plan?

GP apparently refers to storage in the computer, not in the Cloud. The prices are indeed outrageous, but then customers pay them, so in the end it works out for Apple.

Yes, makes sense. I guess I’m getting old, as I think of that as ‘disk’.

> The same is true of how Mac's limit external displays in software

Really? I thought this limitation was in hardware (which is just as bad and just as much Apple's choice)

I think it is possible if you create an /etc/fstab file. I'm using fstab to mount an SD card readonly and prevent automatic mounting of a specific external drive.

Doesn't help. Mac verifies access at this level no matter how many layers of indirection you use. Like, the permission is actually on, in linux terms, /dev/diskdevice instead of /mnt/drive.

No, I don’t. I want to give access to she whole drive, for every app. It’s just bulk file storage. I want the password pop up’s ti go away. My machine is a desktop that is well secured in my home.

Nothing security related is unencrypted on the externals… it’s just my steam library, downloaded ai models, stuff like that.

Kernel extensions are horribly managed.

At one point my Logitech GHUB drivers bugged out and wouldn't launch anymore. Interestingly, the G502 mouse still had a 1000hz polling rate, even after uninstalling the drivers and every trace (as far as I could find).

After trying for over a year to install new drivers, they released a version which added 2 new kexts that they don't remove on uninstall. The only way to uninstall them is to go into safe mode, disable SIP and remove them.

Privacy and Security -> Files and Folders -> <App Name>

I mean, the redesign of Preference is more difficult to navigate and has some rought edges, but this setting is where one would roughly expect it.

That works for “Did I give Foo permission to Bar?” Questions, somewhat for “Who did I give permission to Bar?” questions (the UI would need updating to decrease the needed number of mouse clicks), but is utterly annoying for “What permissions did I give Foo?” questions, where the number necessary clicks is even higher.

I think an ideal system would make answering all three easy.

Yeah, makes sense.

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