The Decade-Long Campaign to Lock Down Your Computer
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Gatekeeper confirms that it's not special and just another public company with a legal duty to make profit for shareholders in spades. Imagine a desktop as locked down as an iPhone, with "dev boxes" that let you run your own apps for a few hundred more, it's positively stomach churning even at the most basic level, then you have to factor in that they will cave in to all sorts of special interests (and perhaps security services). As I understand it, those in the app store gold rush already have to pay for all sorts of development licence and software stuff as it doesn't come with the OS. But what if the TSA doesn't like your TOR app because it's exporting munitions to terrorists? We used to laugh at that law back in the 1990s because it was unenforceable, now it looks like we are headed for a future where the app would just silently disappear from people's desktops. But you paid extra for the dev kit version right? But as you had illegal apps which were detected on your desktop your commercial bread-and-butter ones are now suspended, under review, or taking longer to review for updates.
Steve Jobs' pathological lying about Apple's inventiveness always struck me as unsettling, but there is much worse coming in the future I fear.
[1]http://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-products-hold-the-secr...
The fact is that Gatekeeper is not designed to protect against malware in ALL cases. It is designed to make it easier for ordinary users in MOST cases to protect against malware.
Firstly, most users aren't going to actively try and bypass the restrictions. Secondly, most users aren't going to know that they need to right click, open "Show package contents", understand the .app file structure, browse to the binary and open it from there.
As little protection as that is, I think it could make a dent against trojans. If there were enough trojans to measure, that is.
Let's assume Apple will only very rarely abuse their power (In fact I guess they won't abuse it at all, but for the sake of the argument let's assume they do.)Then running unsigned apps with a right-click is still possible, but the user will be much more aware as this is almost never required. He will therefore actually read what the dialog says and not be trained to ignore it.
In fact, that is what makes this approach different to UAC in Windows and likely to succeed: UAC came up too often and users learned to ignore it. It is already very clear to me that Gatekeeper is rapidly adopted by developers. (By the way I also think Apple has whitelisted many sufficiently outdated applications since I get the "Open" button for some of them even if they are unsigned. But maybe this is also just a bug.)
However, I see no reason to give Apple the benefit of the doubt here. They have been abusive since the moment they first had the idea of restricting what their users could run on their own hardware. Given that history, I'll assume abuse until proven otherwise.
I will fil a Tor bug report, right now, requesting Gatekeeper support.
Let's see ... :)
I have not received feedback, yet, but will monitor this closely.
Webkit is the premier cross-platform browser engine.
> They also relied on funding from Microsoft for their return.
No they didn't. Apple's immediate cashflow problems were solved by a debenture sale in 1996. The stock purchase by Microsoft was intended to align incentives and was really a minor concession. The major benefits for both parties were, on Apple's side, an assurance that Office would still be released for Macintosh, and on Microsoft's side, an assurance that Apple would not pursue IP lawsuits against Microsoft, up to and including stealing the source code for QuickTime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company
> Imagine a desktop as locked down as an iPhone, with "dev boxes" that let you run your own apps for a few hundred more, it's positively stomach churning even at the most basic level, then you have to factor in that they will cave in to all sorts of special interests (and perhaps security services).
And now we've taken off straight into fantasy.
If your comment illustrates anything, it's that when you mix truth, lies, half-truths, and outright fantasy, you can come up with a good flame against any business, be it Apple or the local corner store. Reality is always more slippery than that.
Taken from the KDE guys, who had to make a lot of noise to get contributions back from Apple. And if the KDE guys hadn't done tons of work before, why didn't Apple just start from scratch? If the bad press about it hadn't forced their hand, I doubt they would have done anything. And, at this point, when you count KDE at the start and Google at the end, Apple wouldn't even have a majority share of the reasons for Webkit's success. Good to see your only point on this issue is a weak drowning not waving one. That's the best you've got?
Regarding Apple getting help from MS, $150million is actually a lot in those days. And even more than that was having MS Office and IE on the Mac. I accept if MS hadn't done it though it's likely anti-trust would have come sooner and they would have been broken up. But it's a pretty minor point in argument, so I don't mind refuting your refutation that it was "minor" but then defeating my own argument with a better more contextualized one (MS needed to do it for anti-trust), as it's not a central point. Besides that helped the monopolist by getting in bed with them, seems they will do anything to survive.
>And now we've taken off straight into fantasy.
The key point here, is I don't actually believe it is true right now (like Jobs believed his lies, or at least his fans did and do), I just propose it as a likely future. Anyone with a passing knowledge of computing history knows Apple is neither a hardware or a software company, they are a lifestyle marketing company that has invented very little indeed. On top of that, the pattern of their actions says "big corp/profits".
So in summary, you have used a lame-duck Webkit argument which actually proves my point about how little open source they do whilst helping themselves to as much as they can. You then attack a minor point about the MS investment but nothing on the GUI or design issues, customer service, or lawsuits. Then you finally accuse my plausible projection of being a fantasy. It's not really much of a fantasy to say that it looks like the trajectory of the "remove two buttons from the Xerox mouse we invented because our users are stupid" public company in search of profit that lies constantly about itself and engages in near fraudulent legal proceedings against competitors will at some point decide that their desktops should run like their phones.
All my points show they aren't any different to any other corporation, and how in many cases they are worse, and they already have a device which is locked down like that with many App store scandals. Now they are developing in a very similar direction on the desktop, so we just complete the trend-line and we have 1984-lite (which they notoriously abused for profit in their ads along with many other historical figures in the cynical attempt to tie their bottom line to things people care about, Orwell must truly be turning in his grave to be associated with such saccharine ingenuous phonys).
If Apple doesn't actually make any hardware/software and are just a marketing company then what does that say about the sheer incompetence of their competitors.
I mean seriously the marketing departments in the likes of Samsung, Sony, Microsoft etc must be the laughing stock of the industry if they let Apple who doesn't actually make anything become the world's most successful IT company.
I don't want to argue with you because it's unlikely either of us will gain from the experience. You will simply take it as an opportunity to continue flaming, which I will learn nothing from, and I will try to keep reiterating that you aren't contributing anything useful to the discussion, which you will ignore and respond to with even more useless flames.
And are you implying that it is simply KHTML rebranded and that they have not worked on it for more than 10 years?
But I don't think Apple has that in mind. iOS devices are jailed. OS X devices are relatively open.
When Microsoft announced UEFI Secure Boot, the first articles were about desktops. A "surprise" announcement later about ARM devices being locked and not unlockable should be the proof of what Microsoft wants.
When Apple introduced locked software on the iPod Nano, it was ostensibly to prevent clone makers. Apple can of course always betray their user base, but they haven't done it yet. Cut them some slack.
My post doesn't quote anything Apple said. I am reasoning solely from their actions.
I don't use a Mac - I think they're overpriced and the latest OS versions haven't introduced anything of interest to me. I admit, their hardware is beautiful, but I am frustrated by the lack of high-resolution screens anywhere else in the industry and I intend to vote with my wallet.
In the meantime, feel free to review my comment history. I have tried to contribute links to http://coreboot.org as often as possible. I'm never going to give up the ability to compile my OS from source, which means I won't need an apple laptop. You can pry the kernel source code from my hands when I'm dead.
The only "slack" I propose we give apple is to not claim they are backing Microsoft's Trusted Computing initiative without evidence. Essentially, my argument is exactly the same as yours: why should we claim something about apple that is not backed by evidence?
Make "open" into an expensive niche for professionals.
The low-end and mid-range of the market will be running iOS or WinRT, on ARM hardware. The professionals and, in the case of MS, corperate users will run OSX and Win8PRo, on X86 based chipsets. The ability to side-load will cost you at least 999 dollars for Apple ( price of cheapest OSX device ), and something around 800 dollars for a win8pro/x86 device.
The result will be, that those configurations wont be targetted for consumer stuff. This effectively kills of alternative marketplaces for consumer oriented products. Like, say, Steam!
Yes, and Apple has publicly said that iOS is for the general public, while full-featured PCs will become "trucks" only for specialized usages.
When Apple introduced locked software on the iPod Nano, it was ostensibly to prevent clone makers.
What does forbidding users from running software of their choice have to do with preventing clone makers?