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Comment by ParanoidShroom | Hacker News Reader

How is this possible? Apple messages are just free for anyone to read?

macOS’s permission model doesn’t work correctly. The only thing it’s good at is allotting the user with consent prompts that don’t stop anything.

At least on Unix-like systems, if it's free for you to read, then it's free for any process you run as you to read. Sure, macOS has grafted its own weird "permissions" layer on top of the existing OS level permissions, but at the end of the day, when you run an app on Unix, you're allowing it to act as you, with all the powers your user has.

This used to work when you could trust the software you ran on your system to have access to everything you have access to on your computer. I'd argue that time has largely passed, for most third-party commercial developers and even for some OS vendors.

Best solution is to simply not run software made by blatantly untrustworthy developers. Second best solution would be to run such software as a severely sandboxed user who basically doesn't have access to anything important on your system.

My mental model is to treat AI agents running on your system as a form of malware that is running in a honeypot you control. You don't want to just get rid of it as you want to observe its behaviour (in the case of malware) or hopefully do something useful (AI). But you certainly shouldn't assume it won't do anything bad to your system.

> at the end of the day, when you run an app on Unix, you're allowing it to act as you with all the powers your user has.

This is not at all how it works on macOS, which is what is being discussed in the original post. There are a million different things that require per-app explicit opt-in permissions. This is a case of user error.

I do not know about all Unix like OSes, but Linux has sandboxes you can run as you main user. Not as safe as running as a separate user and sandboxing, or running in a VM, but reasonably solid.

> I'd argue that time has largely passed, for most third-party commercial developers and even for some OS vendors.

Agreed, but what can you do about your OS vendor?

App store apps are required to run in a sandbox that denies file accesses without user permission.

Muse is not available in the macOS app store. Almost certainly because of the sandboxing requirements.

In theory, iOS has some protection: the security model is that not all apps can be trusted with everything, so they have to ask for permission to access camera, GPS, texts and so on. I think apple even kicks apps out of its store that try and abuse this.

It’s not possible. User error lol

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