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Comment by TrajansRow | Hacker News Reader

So, Linux gets a free pass for requiring chmod +x to run his tool, but needing to run xattr on MacOS is somehow worthy of an entire blog post to complain about it?

Serious question - Is it really true that Windows 11 will run an untrusted .exe without a warning?

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By default Windows 11 will not run an untrusted .exe/PE file - it's governed by Microsoft Defender SmartScreen that will present a pop-up scaring people away and it actually isn't intuitive to click-through to run the program unless you've done it before.

But after enough people run it, that disappears. They implement crowdsourced trust, because it isn't a rent extraction exercise but actual concern about malware.

True.

But also most malware delivery now doesn't trigger it because malware developers have gotten craftier. If you're unscrupulous, it's not a concern.

I think that's the most important part in the whole article.

This is a Claude Code tool for developers. I'd assume that any potential user for this tool should be perfectly able to run that xattr command (and if they are not, they probably shouldn't be playing around with Claude Code either... yup, some additional "gatekeeping" from my side here).

You could probably even make some curl -sL https://github.com/myrepo/installme.sh | bash script for these users which takes care of the xattr command.

Your typical macOS enduser does not use command line tools. Or they use something like Homebrew.

Btw the proper way to distribute binary would probably be pkg installer.

You can configure it in a way that it won't allow you to run it at all, but out of the box, you will receive a message which forces you through three clicks. Enough to scare off people with no deep knowledge.

And yes, you can turn all of that off.

Why isn't the author getting that warning then? Is it because he's only testing the tool on the same machine that it was built on?

Yes, downloaded files have a specific attribute, and unless you explicitly unblock the file, it will give a warning.

The main difference is that on Linux you can do it on gui. It's much easier to explain and convice the user to click "allow executing file as program" checkbox than a xatttr obscure cli command.

Which is fine. If you don't know what that obscure xattri cli command is doing, you shouldn't be running it.

macOS makes it easy to run software which meets some requirements by Apple.

macOS makes it possible to run other software if you (the user) know what you're doing.

It wont.

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