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Comment by sedatk | Hacker News Reader

People had drawn and quartered Microsoft because of simple access elevation prompts (UAC) in Vista, let alone a granular permissions system. It had to be dumbed down significantly over the years to be widely accepted.

People have been doing the same for Apple when it tried to bring explicit app permissions to MacOS. https://tidbits.com/2024/08/12/macos-15-sequoias-excessive-p...

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You can't just present the user with something that amounts to a "Press OK to continue" dialog, and call them stupid when they press OK, and call them whiney when they think it's annoying.

That's lazy design, and it doesn't work.

It's insane that the intelligence community spends billions of dollars but none of it has gone towards a usable secure desktop operating system.

Maybe it’s because having the broken systems in use sometimes (often?) benefits the intelligence community.

It only does until someone gets killed by it.

The US intelligence community cares about that? All evidence points to them not caring about who gets killed.

Getting your sources killed significantly setbacks intelligence collecting activities.

Qubes OS exists, albeit it wasn't created by the intelligence community: https://qubes-os.org.

My comment was about funding.

What Apple are doing is significantly worse than UAC.

What Apple is doing is significantly better. Instead of a single popup that grants access to everything and shows before the app even opens. You can granularly accept or deny individual access to things. And the program keeps working when you decline.

Yeah, it’s annoying, but it’s the right thing in this day and age. Condoms are annoying too, but often necessary.

Okay, but permission prompts as such are not why people complained. Sure, of course you don't want apps to record your screen without permission. The problem is Apple has taken away your right to even grant this permission, for more than a week, unless they also consent (and extract a fee from the app developer). It's part of their ongoing frog-boiling campaign to remove users' freedom to run arbitrary software on Macs; this is what people object to.

You can make an argument that UAC was part of a similar strategy, but not paying for an EV certificate only results in a one-time annoyance for your users, not a continuous one. UAC is equivalent to Gatekeeper. This permissions nonsense is worse than UAC.

Money wouldn't be practical if it was always

  Do you want to give your wallet to the cashier? (Yes/No)

Computers don't have to be that stupid about it, it was someone inside Microsoft being passive aggressive instead of actually doing their job and presenting useful options at runtime, that resulted in the horror that was UAC.

We can all agree UAC and permission flags suck.

> Money wouldn't be practical if it was always ...

and yet, most ecommerce shops easily remember the credit card on file (amazon, steam, etc), and you literally can one click buy.

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