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Comment by hej | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing Apple's plan involves Gatekeeper (coming soon) and not shipping OS X with Java and Flash by default (already implemented, but installing both is ridicoulously easy). I'm not sure how teneable and wise that is, though.

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> and not shipping OS X with Java

That won't help the people who actually use Java on OS X. It would be better to allow Oracle to manage the updates for Java on OS X, the vulnerability that Flashback abused was patched by Oracle back in February.

Which, I believe, is the plan in the longer term. Apple is going to leave Java platform development to Oracle - there was a spate of "Apple eliminating Java from OS X" articles back when it was announced (last year?)

It was November 2010: Oracle and Apple announce OpenJDK Project for Java on Mac OS X (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/11/12/oracle_and_app...)

Thanks for being my lazy web.

I agree - but there is a catch: Gatekeeper will help to prevent things like that. The default mode in Mountain Lion is only to allow to run apps downloaded from the App Store and/or signed by a developer whose certificate can be revoked by Apple at any time. This will prevent at least the spreading of malicious software components after it has been discovered. And this is the point... Apple needs to react faster and malicious software has to be detected first - otherwise a revoking system makes little sense...

So the default mode of the entire operating system is to only let you install software approved, for a fee, by Apple? Go business. Am I understanding correctly?

Not quite. You can get a free certificate for non-appstore apps. Apps signed with the free cert aren't reviewed or endorsed by Apple, but they can revoke the certificate after the fact if they find that you've been publishing malicious apps. The Mountain Lion default allows signed apps only, both appstore and non-appstore. You can also set it to 'appstore only' or 'anything goes'.

No, Developer IDs are free.

Is Apple getting dinged for Java installation being too easy? That seems pretty easy to fix. Having Java on by default in Safari was a bad choice (just like disk images and packages last year). I hope they'll do a scan and remove with Software Update soon, if that's possible.

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