TomaszZielinski

Yeah, I forgot there’s the intermediate VM level, and user folders are shared there so that folders could be mounted to the individual containers using host paths.

My personal take is that the only way to be reasonably sure you're OK is to install as few apps as possible and then as few plugins as possible (and ideally stick to the bundled ones only). I don’t think it’s controversial, but for some reason this is not how many people think, even if in the real world you don’t give keys to your place to everyone who says they’re cool :)

I believe LS has some protections against this. Never tried them, but there are config related security options, incl. protection against synthetic events. So they definitely put some thought into that.

I treat LS as a privacy/anti-telemetry/anti-accident tool, not as anti malware.

Obviously it can detect malware if there’s a connection to some weird site, but it’s more like a bonus than a reliable test.

If you need to block FS access, then per app containers or VMs are the way to go. The container/VM sandboxes your files, and Little Snitch can then manage externa connectivity (you might still want to allow connection to some legit domains—-but maybe not github.com as that can be use to upload your data. I meant something like updates.someapp.com)

Ahh, this brings memories - back in the day GORILLAS.BAS was a perfect game, and also a mind blowing piece of code (for a kid, ofc)!

As a kid I had Atari 520ST(M) and GEM was like a… window to a magic world. It was so different from anything I had seen before (older Atari, ZX Spectrum, C64).

Funny thing is that it was also my window to Turbo Pascal, because there was a PC emulator (8086 on an 68000!). It run very slowly, but fast enough to be usable.

The contrast between the magic of GEM and the crude text mode of DOS was another thing I remember - I think it made DOS much more exciting than it was in reality :)

Safari is interesting. It's been separate, except for major macOS updates, which had it bundled. But if you had a newer Safari on an older macOS, and upgraded macOS to anything else that the latest version, then your Safari was downgraded, often causing data loss..

In Sonoma or Sequoia they started bundling all Safari updates with macOS, but right now Safari 26 appeared as a separate update in Sonoma/Sequoia—-and it will likely stay that way.

Each thing separately can be explained, but when put together it’s somewhat messy..

Let me play devil's advocate for a second, because I feel it’s more nuanced.

Pros:

- [for users] 15.8.5 patches one high-profile bug.

- [for Apple] minimal effort which translates to longer perceived support time

Cons:

- It leaves unpatched multiple bugs fixed in iOS 16-26, and so it might give users false sense of security

I'm on a fence here, especially without real numbers

Yes, I also have fond memories of quite a few TUI apps for DOS. Not sure if it’s pure nostalgia, it might be. But then it feels like dark magic that you could have 40kB .COM or 100kB .EXE doing so many things and looking so nicely..

Yeah, that's what I meant by hardening the existing stuff.

It's very good they are doing it and we're all more secure thanks to that, but it’s not a caps-based system designed from scratch.

Well put! But I think there's an interesting exception—APFS seems to be very reliable. It's been quite a few years since the very successful silent auto migration and it’s pretty quiet about it, which is a good thing for filesystems.

Ah OK, I see it now—I focused too much on the „magic syntax”.

As for hooks, I guess I mentally treat them as magic that lives in its own lane, and so I've never really thought that I could do anything with them, other than what the manual prescribes.

I don't know much (if anything) about it, but it can be turned into an interesting thought experiment.

Let’s use Apple as an example, as they tend to do major transitions on a regular basis.

So, let’s say that the top tier already approved the new security mode(l).

Now, how to do it?

My understanding is that most if not all APIs would have to be changed or replaced. So that's pretty much a new OS, that needs new apps (if the APIs change, you cannot simply recompile the apps).

Now, if you expose the existing APIs to the new OS/apps, then what's the gain?

And if you don't expose them, then you basically need a VM. I mean, I don’t know Darwin syscalls, but I suspect you might need new syscalls as well.

And so you end up with a brand new OS that lives in a VM and has no apps. So it's likely order(s?) of magnitude more profitable to just harden the existing platforms.