The full disk access permission is something you give to backup software.
If you give full-disk access to Meta software running on your main computer, Meta is not going to respect your privacy.
> Friday’s [full-disk access] announcement comes two weeks after tech columnist Jason Aten said that Meta’s new general-purpose AI agent Muse sent him an unsolicited notification referencing a thread between him and a co-worker over Apple Messages. Aten said he never granted Muse permissions to read his messages and had assumed they were off-limits. Social media last week blew up with masses of people who agreed and said the incident showed that AI assistants given access to calendars, emails, messages, shopping accounts, and other resources are akin to a skill saw or other power tool. While potentially useful, they can do real damage if not used carefully.
> Social media last week blew up with masses of people who agreed and said the incident showed that AI assistants given access to calendars, emails, messages, shopping accounts, and other resources are akin to a skill saw or other power tool. While potentially useful, they can do real damage if not used carefully.
This brought to mind Neal Stephenson's essay "Unix - The Hole Hawg of Operating Systems" from back in the day (1999):
> I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs, which it did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few six-inch-diameter holes through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I chucked in a new hole saw, went up to the second story, reached down between the newly installed floor joists, and began to cut through the first-floor ceiling below. Where my homeowner's drill had labored and whined to spin the huge bit around, and had stalled at the slightest obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid consistency of a spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel pipe handle and a joist, producing a few lacerations, each surrounded by a wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. It also bent the hole saw itself, though not so badly that I couldn't use it. After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror.
> But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner's product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure to envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it.
Which is why I wish Apple would support Linux out of the box on their M-series hardware.
I do not want to hand my child a Hole Hog, I want to hand them a residential power drill with the torque settings locked to a safe level. I need a fucking Hole Hog for the work I do.
There is a time and a place for every tool, and sometimes the hands holding the tool influence this more than an expert would care to admit, who instead say things like “you’re doing it wrong!” to admonish users who didn’t even know there was a difference between the tool they held and the one they needed.
I thought they were calling the residential drill a hole hawg.
To your point though, not everything in Mac can be solved via root user privilege. SIP is annoying to toggle, the main issue being discussed also demonstrates why Mac OS is not the proverbial Hole Hawg as well.
> SIP is annoying to toggle, the main issue being discussed also demonstrates why Mac OS is not the proverbial Hole Hawg as well.
macOS in its default configuration may not be the HH, but if SIP removes those limitations it is still available.
As someone who (a) does some tech support for family, but also (b) uses a MacBook for sysadmining Linux servers, but kind of happy with the current balance. I don't think I've run into SIP limitations, so perhaps I'm not an 'advanced' enough user of macOS (MacPorts generally works for the 'extras' I need on top of base macOS).
Well shit, I went to verify my litany of QoL complaints that couldn’t be resolved via disabling SIP and turns out there has since been a solution for for the main one (Gatekeeper) and the remaining issues boil down to personal particularities.
So I rescind “needing” a hole hawg and correct it to “strongly prefer or desire” a hole hawg. Mainly because I shouldn’t have to rip apart a magic keyboard to embed a touch ID module into a 3D printed case for a standalone fingerprint reader module.
Where the analogy fails is that the relationship between doing the thing (ie. using a Hole Hawg or granting agents access to your data) and the consequences (ie. ruining your house or getting pwned) is far less obvious in the case of AI, especially if it approximately works most of the time and the failures are seemingly random.
And the folks productizing this are actively working against noticing its power by making it cutesy. It's a good product choice IFF it matches the capabilities, and it absolutely positively does not.
Jesus, that’s a great essay. Gibson and Stephenson are seen as the twin prophets of Cyberpunk - Gibson wrote about society, Stephenson wrote about technology. That man understands the technium better than anyone else out there.
(Bruce Sterling was the weird hippie who kept feeding interesting things into the machine to see what colors they made - without him, Cyberpunk would’ve died on the vine.)
FDA is in fact not required for backup software nor should it be. For example, Bombich is granted the com.apple.security.files.all entitlement for Carbon Copy Cloner, because backup software needs to just work without the user chancing a miss on the TCC prompt when they first set it up only to find out the app didn't backup their photos after losing all their data.
Apple stopped adding protected file-system domains for some reason, and have only expanded TCC to entail more vague and nonsense monikers. Sandboxed apps of importance like Messages, Notes, Reminders, and so on, all just end up under the "Full Disk Access" umbrella because they all store their databases in ~/Library/Containers, and FDA is really the only thing gating access to that. Apple should just start pushing the permissions one level down into that folder. Do I want to give an agent access to my Safari history, but not my messages? Too fuckin bad! No way to slice that right now, it gets full disk access and can access anything.
I think that was the initial concept of what "Full Disk Access" was supposed to be, but I've run into needing to give some of my own apps full disk access for very innocuous reasons. Recently, I wanted to build a little app to give me a Time Machine on/off switch by calling "tmutil enable/disable". A single on/off command with no need to access any of my data, but its use was gated behind needing Full Disk Access. Hopefully if Apple is rethinking Full Disk Access permissions they will rethink better ways to provide these sort of permissions.
The problem I have is that when I ssh into my mac, I want to be able to control software from the command line and having a popup authorization window that just halts the software being controlled is not good for me. I'm okay with having the authorization, but they need to make it visible to ssh users when ssh'ing in.
> ...the uses of Full Disk Access go well beyond the category of backup apps, and it is worrisome to see Apple give it such a limited frame. I have given that permission to disk management utilities, Sketch, Terminal, and other apps I do not want to be throwing permissions requests as I move around my drives. Is Apple suggesting this capability could be limited in the future to backup applications alone? I do not like that.
If Full Disk Access were, in future, to be something that I could not grant to (for instance) the Terminal, because it is not a backup app, that would severely limit my ability to do work on a Mac, both as hobbyist and as computer professional.
I agree that the agent situation is a fairly serious concern; I just don't want to see Apple throw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater.
From Apple's statement, there doesn't seem to be any plan to remove the full disk access permission.
They want unsophisticated users to understand that they would be granting unlimited access to all of their personal data if they grant software that permission.
> We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy.
... for now. Anytime I download an unsigned binary I need to go through this song and dance of figuring out again what command I need to run to strip the quarantine tag because none of the UIs that are supposed to allow me to trust this binary work.
I hope what they offer is the ability to set more granular rules, like allowing my Borg backup script to access the whole disk, but not any random Git precommit hook (for example). Given that practically all of the existing restrictive security features on macOS (for example, SIP) can be disabled, I feel confident that Apple will make hobbyist and professional use cases still possible, just requiring some extra scary messages. I’m ok with that trade off.
Another case of "This is why we can't have nice things." Application developers who feel entitled to accessing everything they can on the user's computer, without obtaining consent from the user. So, now we have to have these consent walls everywhere. Way to go, application developers.
1 - we're all going to suffer because meta are scum. It's not "all application developers", it's "exactly who you assumed it would be", and also too, "exactly the same scum who've spent the last 10 years working around privacy controls any possible way they can and deliberately obfuscating the choices people make around their privacy." The people who made pervert glasses and did covert web-to-app tracking by opening local ports [1] and bought sketchy spyware to track everything you did and scurried away from the light the second someone asked about it [2], [3]. And on and on and on.
Spotify has long asked for it and... they use it to copy my local mp3s onto my phone so I can listen to them away from my computer. It's awesome.
This doesn't mean that Apple isn't champing at the bit to use Meta as an excuse to screw all software developers. If Apple cared about their users, they'd do something like revoke Meta's software keys and leave responsible developers alone. Alas, Apple will obviously exploit this too :(
To read Ben is to glimpse the AI divide: he's honestly and emphatically choosing based on whether it makes it easier for him to use his AI agents, even if that means ditching Apple for the Zuckerberg's melee. It's that important to his personal productivity. AI-native product streams will separate from what came before, as will the people who master them.
That said, I disagree on Apple: while the UI can be perfect, it has always imperfectly been trying to do the right thing technically in concert with developers and users, which puts it in the position of imposing constraints that developers and users can relax to varying degrees: wearable and home devices (not at all), iOS (somewhat), macOS (mostly).
wrt a hacker's future: I'm still traumatized both by decades of windows reboots and virus scanning, and by decades of squeezing into Linux (just don't sleep, avoid these displays...). I'm glad Apple stuff mostly just works and ordinary people still have access to unlocked, general-purpose computers, but that might not last. Cheap AI coding might remove any financial incentive to support users programming on their own, and we'd be left with locked devices as consumers or work-only access to programmable computers (at least for the latest hardware of note). If a 40% premium for mac hardware is the price we pay for continued access, so be it.
For all of Linux's warts, it's still better than the commercial crap coming from Microsoft and Apple that focuses on 99% of consumers. For many of us at HN, Linux is a blessing and it's only getting better.
I would argue that someone who would open a remote access port to the internet with no filtering is exactly the kind of person that Apple needs to protect from themselves
Yeah, it was neat that Claude found this, but Thompson showed an almost criminal lack of security awareness by having VNC/ARD open to the internet
Why does Apple need to protect anyone from themselves? This is the problem with commercial vendors creeping in computing freedom. It is exactly this mentality that people shouldn't be the ones responsible for the hardware and software they own and operate which erodes that freedom.
Because people will shoot themselves in the foot if you give them a shotgun. A big part of why the Mac as a platform blossomed in the late 2000s forward was because it was much less likely you'd get hacked by clicking the wrong link or just opening an email than it was on a Windows machine (among other reasons)
And, all of that said, Apple hasn't said anything about not letting people have full access to their disks. Just that you're going to have to be very intentional, click through a very scary warning, to do so. Happy to do that to prevent my mom or dad from accidentally opening up their machine to every hacker in Belarus or worse yet Facebook
I don't think "let's just stick with how things work in the actual firearms industry" is what I was going for or a sane position to take on just about anything
The thing is, Apple customers typically don't want that kind of power and responsibility. They view the limitations as a liberating force.
When my mother in law switched from (XP-era) Windows to OS X, she expressed a profound sense of relief that she didn't have to worry so much about accidentally breaking it. She has absolutely no desire to learn computers well enough to understand a system that gives her more control. In her experience it never enabled her to do anything particularly relevant to her own interests, and mostly accomplished the complete opposite by leaving her slightly afraid to do anything. My own efforts to try and explain her computer problems and how to avoid them in the future did not help; they only served to communicate to her that the computer was indeed complicated and scary.
Unfortunately, it's often the case that the blast radius of the footgun (ouch, mixed weaponry metaphor) is bigger than the person who's holding the gun, and other users' security may be compromised...
Because people have lives to get on with. People need to use computers. People have better things to do with their time than spend weekends learning about the details of internet security. It is an elitist position to say that protections erode freedom. In my ICE car the engineers have specified the grade of oil that I need to use. Certainly if I knew the details of the engine, the weather it will be used in, and other factors I could choose alternate oil grades. Are my freedoms being eroded by grade of oil being mandated?
> The question, however, is whether what they are designed for is the future I am barreling towards, one where agentic abstraction both renders traditional interfaces relics
I think he was burying the lede but glad he finally posed the question.
I think it's a bigger risk factor for Apple than is generally assumed. If consumers get used to the freedom but endemic spying of products like Muse, Apple may have a hard time sticking to their privacy and security mandate.
From Apple's statement, they want to be sure users understand that they are handing Meta access to all of their personal data if they grant Muse (or other AI agents) the full-disk access permission.
> Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems—including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history—without users’ full knowledge and understanding. For communication apps, this can also compromise the privacy of the people users are communicating with.
As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy.
> "We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access"
This "you are entering the wilderness, I will not be able to protect you anymore if you proceed" framing reminds me of the alternative AppStore case, where Apple (and Google) applied scare-tactics in the UI to discourage users from giving permissions to alternative stores.
Or the scary warnings today against disabling SIP, repeated by forum users anywhere it’s discussed.
Which happens to be the only way to disable the TCC permission dialogs OP complains about. Guess the warnings worked well enough that no one knows that anymore.
> System Integrity Protection is a security technology designed to help prevent potentially malicious software from modifying protected files and folders on your Mac. System Integrity Protection restricts the root user account and limits the actions that the root user can perform on protected parts of the Mac operating system.
Before System Integrity Protection, the root user had no permission restrictions, so it could access any system folder or app on your Mac. Software obtained root-level access when you entered your administrator name and password to install the software. That allowed the software to modify or overwrite any system file
In that case, it will be their own dang fault. Modern MacOS is a mess of update nags, unwanted notifications, and permissions prompts. We want sandboxing and security patches but the UX around it is abominable.
It's the constant risk for Apple that its customer base voluntarily invites any company to interact with them directly, because it's Apple's prerogative to broker the access to its users.
So as always, for the sake of "privacy" Apple needs to take action to protect the users from "themselves", and make it undesirable to grant others the same access Apple has...
I think the observation Ben is making, is that Apple no longer has a grasp on the future purchases in the market. He makes it explicit with this quote: "I can, for the first time, envision a future where I don’t buy Apple by default." It used to be a given that we would refresh every 3-4 years, thats probably no longer guaranteed.
Observationally, I would argue we've all been expecting this for this for a long time. Every year Apple has raised the price of allegiance and every year we've paid it, waiting for products like the framework laptop or certain linux distros to become mature. We're still not there yet, but how much longer until there is real competition in the personal computer market?
What I find most surprising, is that I don't think we got any sort of timeline from Apple on this change and its very vague (which just fuels articles like this).
So did this initiative within Apple just start and we could be looking at this change coming in Mac 28?
I don't remember another time of an announcement like this from Apple of a major change with so little information, though I could be wrong or hint of when.
Regarding the concern, while I do hope that there is still a way to grant actual full disk access to some applications. Even Apple called out a non controversial need for something like that, backup software. I can also think of security scanning software, a lot of businesses have those deployed to corporate Mac's. I do also think that better controls around it, especially in this age of vibe coded apps that never actually think about security or actively hostile companies like meta.
Did the author have his Mac exposed to the internet and not behind a firewall? How did his screen sharing port 5900 get accessed if he was behind a physical firewall/home router?
> This system is annoying but manageable on your primary Mac; it’s a disaster on a headless Mac running agents, for two reasons. First, agents write new programs all of the time, and in my case, those programs need access to devices on my network (SMB shares, for example, trigger a TCC warning). What I need is a permission layer for agents, not the programs they create; TCC is operating at the wrong level of abstraction.
Doesn’t that already exist? If I give Terminal.app access to the entire disk, CLI tools started by the app (indirectly: Terminal.app runs a shell, and the shell runs the tools) have that access, too.
And I don’t think that’s because Apple gives Terminal.app preferential access. Google tells me that works for iTerm, too.
Or would it mean agents need to do some special thing to launch tools?
I think some standards org needs to define comprehensive agent permissions model first before the OS raises the abstraction to agent level authorization.
Might be that you'll need LLMs to define the model, as LLMs will immediately drive a truck through any hole the standard left in by accident. They're really good at this.
Yeah, the dude wrote a 3,500-word article trashing Apple when he can't even follow the most basic security practice in the first place.
I got confused for a second how Claude Code and agents are related to this piece. Of course they aren't. Anyone with a half brain about securing their system would never run into any of this in the first place. Hiring Claude Code to do scanning every half an hour is such a waste of tokens.
You know he did the 'chef's kiss' when his frontier model that he pays a subscription on completed this article.
The 'built a server that's going to run linux' line confused me. gOiNg tO? This boy didn't have 20 minutes to write a usb, shred the disks in live boot and install?
it's a vnc port, it'd also require the router to have it opened. Reading the article I think the user opened it themselves.
It does get opened automagically on the mac side when screen sharing is turned on.
> The problem is that for my particular use case — a headless, always-on Mac Mini that I primarily access from other computers and my phone through the ChatGPT and Claude apps — macOS is incredibly hostile
> As noted by the NCSC, the vulnerability is being exploited when port 5900 is exposed to the Internet. When screen sharing is turned on, the macOS firewall opens the port. Routers and dedicated firewalls generally block the port unless configured to override that setting.
> Obviously I should have — and will be — using a VPN going forward (the foundation of my entire approach to security is Tailscale); what I will note, however, is that TCC basically leaves me no choice but to have screen sharing enabled if I want to actually use my Mac Mini in the way I want to use it. I use screen-sharing constantly — including from my phone — and almost every time it’s to click “OK” on a stupid prompt that I’ve long since stopped taking seriously.
> Obviously I should have — and will be — using a VPN going forward
That's my takeaway from the article. I have trouble understanding how the author managed to extrapolate all these things about Apple from an obvious oversight on their part. I would never write a 3,000-word article about how bad someone else is because of an issue I caused for myself.
Software WILL have bugs and vulnerabilities, regardless of whether it's an OS or user application, whether it's from Apple or another company, or the update frequency/mechanism. If you can't even follow the most basic security practice on your part, you simply don't have any authority to discuss security otherwise.
Apple's remote access feature, that you would make remotely accessible for obvious reasons, apparently had a critical authentication bug.
Apple did not ship a security patch for this, allowing the vulnerability to be exploited a week later despite "automatically install security updates" being on.
Yes, OP could have prevented this by putting an additional VPN authentication layer in front of the Mac's built-in remote access.
> That doesn't excuse the mistakes on Apple's part.
Let's first establish that Apple definitely has a stake in this.
How long they can come up with a fix and then distribute them, that's a question. You can't expect any company to fix a vulnerability within 5min. Whether one week is too long or their delivery mechanism is good, I can't tell, and I don't think there is a standard in the entire industry.
That doesn't mean it's useful to write an article about "I didn't do my part BUT you are too slow". Even if Apple somehow fixes this within an hour of the disclosure and delivers the update, with the bad configuration, the machine is still vulnerable within that window. Does that change the nature of the narrative?
I don't think anyone criticized the timing of the patch.
But I find it egregious that they didn't roll it out as a security update at all, which is why it was not automatically installed in OP's case, even though the fix was already available.
I mean, what else requires a hotfix via security update if not a fatal flaw in your remote access authentication leading to full root access, that is actively being exploited in the wild?
Also, it's not really on the user to gate remote access behind an additional firewall and authentication layer. This is something that just has to work securely.
If it doesn't, that's understandable, but still hardly the user's fault.
> what else requires a hotfix via security update if not a fatal flaw in your remote access authentication leading to full root access, that is actively being exploited in the wild?
> Also, it's not really on the user to gate remote access behind an additional firewall and authentication layer. This is something that just has to work securely.
The thing is that many of these people think they know what they are doing and do not think about security, only how awesome LLMs and AI make their experience until something bad happens.
Even though this was a valid critical bug [1], you need to enable screen sharing and allow connections to and from port 5900 on your router for a remote person to be able to exploit this.
Any security conscious person would probably be using a VPN (Wireguard or Tailscale) to prevent something like this, in the first place.
> almost every time it’s to click “OK” on a stupid prompt that I’ve long since stopped taking seriously.
The line above tells you how seriously this person takes security prompts.
> Hopefully Apple has in mind a solution to this situation that will still enable knowledgeable power users to confirm agreement to a sufficiently scary warning and put their Macs in a state similar to what we have today. I worry. What alleviates my worst fears is the knowledge that every technical user at Apple itself needs to use their Mac as the powerful Unix workstation OS that it is. Some of us need dangerously powerful tools. Most Mac users, however, do not — and don’t realize they’re using a dangerously powerful Unix workstation with a very friendly (literal) face.
> What alleviates my worst fears is the knowledge that every technical user at Apple itself needs to use their Mac as the powerful Unix workstation OS that it is.
What Gruber didn't realize is that Apple gives its engineers special internal tools that can bypass the restrictions we on the outside have to suffer.
I'm sure it's also the case that internal development macOS builds are compiled differently than public release builds. They basically have to be for Apple engineers to modify them during development.
We can disable SIP with a reboot to recovery and a single command. That doesn't seem like too high a bridge to cross and probably as good as any internal tool, if that isn't what they get in the first place.
Which system integrity protection are you worried about missing? Muse being able to exfiltrate the contents of your messages db doesn’t compromise system integrity to begin with. It being able to write arguably does, but this whole conversation was about how to grant it full disk access in the future anyway.
And OP had SIP enabled, but his system still got compromised with a remote exploit.
Sort of; SIP originally was simply meant to protect /System from root. But nowadays, it's more used for system attestation. Which in turn is used by the OS to decide how to ask for and enforce certain user permissions and sandbox profiles.
Protection from the sort of malware OP was hit with is the most commonly cited dire warning against disabling SIP. I just assumed that was also the reason you were against disabling SIP in order to grant permissions to software you intentionally installed.
> Protection from the sort of malware OP was hit with is the most commonly cited dire warning against disabling SIP. I just assumed that was also the reason you were against disabling SIP in order to grant permissions to software you intentionally installed.
No. The confusion here is that the Stratechery post combines multiple stories. There was a macOS screen sharing vulnerability, now fixed. The vulnerability existed even with SIP enabled, and that vulnerability is how Ben Thompson's Mac was hacked.
The question was, why did Thompson's Mac have the screen sharing port open to the internet, and that's when Thompson explained that the Mac was running an agent.
Coincidentally, Apple published a developer note on Friday about upcoming changes to Full Disk Access, which mentioned AI agents. Apple did not give any specific reason for this change, but presumably the inspiration was a very recent public controversy initiated by a journalist whose Messages database on macOS was read and uploaded by the Meta Muse app. Muse and similar AI apps request Full Disk Access to access all of the user's information. Without SIP, these apps would be able to suck up all of your data without permission.
If you're arguing that SIP isn't a useful defense against malware, I agree there.
Sandboxing full disk reads is orthogonal to what SIP actually provides. It's entirely possible for an unsandboxed binary to slurp your private data even with SIP enabled.
> What about all the stuff they've done to keep it open
I don't understand the purpose of your reply?
One of your examples is "Disabling SIP", but you're replying to a thread that has already been discussing this very topic, so it makes no sense to ask us "what about" that.
The issue is really the difficulty of using macOS as an expert user, and this has become significantly more difficult over the years. You mention "Developer ID distribution and notarisation", but both of those are actually restrictions that were added later to a previously open system. Notarization in particular has become a major pain for developers. Also "Gatekeeper Open Anyway override" has become significantly more difficult for users over the years.
> I understand that people are nervous about giving these agents access to one’s computer — as I noted, the Mac Mini in question has nothing on it except for Codex and Claude — but in this case you could make the case that I would have been in much more trouble had I not had an agent running persistently.
If the burglar breaks in through the cat door but she wakes you to let you know, did the cat make you more safe?
> What’s better, using a structured reminders app that you have to check, or simply being reminded directly by an agent? In truth the answer will likely vary by person, but it’s worth pointing out that Apple is so married to the app paradigm that they probably never even considered the alternative.
This was the most interesting part to me. I wonder what this divide looks like in the real world. I have a hard time believing this is true for everyone:
> I don’t want a different UI per app, when I have at my disposal true UI — the Universal Interface for everything digital.
I have a Macmini purposely for Codex to do whatever. Nothing personal on it. It’s been a productivity boost 1000x for me. I screen share in, give it some tasks, tell it to install software, run brew whatever, use QGIS and other complex software and email me screenshots. Astonishing.
But I’m worried because of this and other guardrails all of that will be impossible or much harder in the future.
I wonder what apple does when confronted with software that auto-approves the TCC prompt via a VNC connection to localhost.
If there’s some protections that prevent it from happening via localhost, it feels like the next step is to proxy through another host on the LAN.
Heck, I wonder if someone’s already written an app that’ll connect to VNC, look for any permission prompts, and approve. His agent software could just poke it anytime it thinks it’s blocked.
What I took home from reading this article is Apple NOT deploying security updates as security updates. That to me is SO stupid on their part—coercing to the point updates by withholding important security updates.
I do feel since I use hermes on my work windows computer and grok bot in the cloud on everything else that computer use is so useful and important, but I'm also worried that Apple will not be a good choice for that.
Apple can’t see a future where Mac isn’t like iPhone. They need a 30% cut of all software revenue, want a 30% cut of any AI tokens you use, and will steal 30% of your time as a software developer developing for your own account any way you can.
This. I'm quite confident that they look at the Mac as a "profit-leaking" product they gradually need to bring on-par with their other products, but can't make any big steps to avoid alienating the userbase.
But I'm sure the day of the iOS-based iMac will come, and pandora's box will be opened. Businesses will love it, especially those with Kiosk use-cases, and not before long we will read everywhere (including here) how superior the security is to a Mac for everyday use...
They must have a prototype of an iPad somewhere that can run both iOS and Mac software but they are too comfortable with their current product positioning. I thought Microsoft had a good idea with Windows 8, I mean, I don’t travel with a laptop anymore, just an iPad and wireless mouse and keyboard. If I need to use desktop software I use RDP or something like that. I go to a hackathon and I have both the sleekest and the beefiest hardware. It’s great. An iPad could give a similar experience with local compute if only Apple would let it.
But to back into it…. OpenClaw amd Muse and stuff give people a real reason to buy a Mac but Apple doesn’t like it.
> "OpenClaw amd Muse and stuff give people a real reason to buy a Mac but Apple doesn’t like it."
Yeah, because a year down the road they might give the same people a reason to upgrade to another box, not from Apple.
Apple needs to ensure that they stand in the middle of every supplier relationship their customers have.
That's quite difficult when they don't provide direct value to both, so the natural conclusion is for Apple to present itself as a care-taker, the only one who prevents the user from taking any harm...
That’s a pretty elaborate and conspiratorial way to say “Apple isn’t especially interested in market segments they’re not trying to serve”. Which I think is true of most companies?
It's meant to say "Apple prefers if companies are not able to enter relationships with Apple customers without Apple being in the middle", which is not typical for most companies
Well I hear a lot of “silly boomer, don’t you know a computer is a computer and a phone is a phone” but many whippersnappers don’t know that Von Newman proved all computers are equivalent in theory and video game emulation proves they are in practice.
I think the barriers that exist depend on path dependence and other accidents of development. The laptop has a hinge and a trackpad that help you when you are flying on a plane. 2-in-1s drove stewardesses crazy because they couldn’t figure out if you had to stow them for takeoff. For that matter battery sizes are limited because of the needs of that industry which might seem justified if you live in NYC and can fly to London for what it less to costs to fly from my small town to NYC. Maybe if they’d invest in my community I’d care what they think but I think it’s unjust.
All the time I use a cheap plastic clip and a cheap Bluetooth mouse and keyboard and RDP into a monster computer from my tablet. If I have a real desk or table it’s fine, if you really have to put your laptop on your lap that hinge looks like genius. I’ll grant the 2-in-1 can be demoed at CES and the Bluetooth-based system can’t because they have too many devices in too small a space for Bluetooth to be reliable.
Even if I don’t have the mouse and keyboard I can still do a lot with the touchscreen.
The worst thing Win 8 revealed was that you could have the ‘windows’ keys on computer keyboards for almost 20 years and nobody noticed because…. It looks like an ad and people think anything that looks like an ad “just doesn’t work” (as opposed to “doesn’t just work”). If you were missing the start button you could just push that button but people treated that like putting their hand in the toilet.
The Mac has had the ability to run iPad apps for quite a few years now, since Apple Silicon. Unfortunately it is opt-in for developers and most don't. I wonder if it will become non-optional (or at least opt-out) with the touchscreen MBP rumoured for this fall.
I think that's the unification route they are most likely to take, hopefully along with a thinner/smaller MacBook design and built-in cellular.
They've taken so many swings at the iPad Pro (both hardware and software), and it has never been as good as the MacBook.
> An iPad could give a similar experience with local compute if only Apple would let it.
It does, it's called the MacBook Neo.
iPad sales have been rather stagnant in the last few years, while they made bank with their low-cost laptop. On a purely conceptual level I don't think they're gonna merge the two anytime soon, even if they will probably start sharing the very same logic board from their next revision.
Stagnant because (1) they don’t want to cannibalize iPhone and Mac and (2) competitors have failed to do make tablets that do a lot more than become e-waste. Microsoft had a reason to make the transition as carriers didn’t allow them to make a phone platform but their other enemies like Dell, HP and Lenovo had neither the motivation nor engineering skills to come along.
>...but can't make any big steps to avoid alienating the userbase.
I think the way this could work is by linking certain capabilities to MDM or a developer program membership. Organisations and people who really need it would still be able to get it but regular users would not.
You forgot, they want 30% (or more) of your files to be inaccessible by you, so you can't access the data/media you've downloaded in ways apple doesn't like, or disable apple daemons that collect telemetry or whatever.
Unlike 30 years ago, now I see anti-developer as a feature for end users. The current trend is that big corporation developers just abuse any system to squeeze profits/information from end users as much as possible.
In this case apple do this because Meta are abusing.
I don't think that's fair, they've spent a lot of time and effort ensuring the Mac is still an open/UNIX like platform, including (where they didn't have to):
These are basically all things that an engineering org can justify as necessary for some reason but can immediately disappear when leadership announces a change in strategy.
Not to take away from your point too much - this is a significant amount of work that shows their current stance towards maintaining the mac as a premium development platform. But I imagine they will start to split this - lower cost SKUs will get the iOS-ified OS while "Pro" SKUs will get (some of) the above and can still install homebrew, to prevent a full developer revolt.
Techies will figure out how to "jailbreak" the lower SKUs to unlock the full experience and the amount of people that follow through with that will round to 0%. Tech businesses will buy the >$3k Pros for their devs.
> Apple can’t see a future where Mac isn’t like iPhone.
Can you blame them? Their managers cannot code, so they need something else that is "useful" to do. And the one thing they find useful is to increase revenue.
If the main to run Apple computers is their hardware, why not to run it with Linux. Aside from better filesystems (Theo tests were shocking to me, how bad FS you guys have), you would get better compartmenalization and I believe better security. What's missing?
Better design in terms of resource isolation and control, too.
I use krunai. It is not quite as flexible as some people probably want (strongly linked to a specific non-systemd version of Debian 13), but there are many other options as well, such as Lume, Virtualization.framework, etc.
Much better than wrangling server code via Apple nonsense, and there are no real downsides after you've done the integration/deployment work once, assuming you are not building on some closed source thing that only runs on macOS.
I don't get this reaction to Apple making Full Disk Access more explicit. Whether they're "happy" or "sad" about agents doesn't seem responsive at all.
Kinda seems like whenever you spend 10 seconds thinking about the average user, social media gets angry. The quoted justification by Apple seems reasonable.
Being happy or not has nothing to do with it, in my understanding as well. Removing full system access from non-deterministic tools prone to prompt injections seems like the most obvious thing to do. There's a reason I run all my projects in rootless isolated containers these days. There has never really been "trust" in software, but the lack of trust is a lot more obvious these days.
Is the conclusion of this that Apple shouldn't add robust and hard to automate around privacy guards because we should all just do as he does - use a dedicated Mac mini for agents with no personal files on for privacy?
I assume any computer connected to my LAN is also a dedicated attack vector for everything on my LAN in case of compromise.
Exposing any port directly to the Internet is a huge risk these days—at minimum I'd put a very strong firewall in front, and unless it's serving the general public, switch to a non standard port. It's not much but would prevent the dumb automated scripts that operate on standard ports.
He had enabled a setting that says "Install [...] security updates". If enabling that setting does not lead to the system installing security updates, that's on Apple.
My rule: if a company, in any way, forces you, the user, within reason to do anything you don't want to do, or prevent you from doing anything you would want to do, then ditch that company ASAP.
“If Woody had only gone right to the police(used a vpn), this would not have happened.”
It’s not like a VPN is some arcane knowledge. I guarantee Claude would have told him or practically yelled at him if he asked how he could have secured his mac exposed to the open internet.
Glad he actually acknowledged it and is getting tailscale or similar.
TCC throws up vista-style warning prompts everywhere, so to bypass them he opened up remote desktop so he could manually dismiss them, which then got exploited via a recent pre-auth bug in ARD.
If the TCC prompts could be dismissable some other way (e.g. via CLI with root permission) presumably he wouldn't have resorted to such measures. I sort of see the point, the lesson from Vista is that if you put up annoying obstacles people are going to the easiest workaround, bulldozing over them rather than putting up with them. People will end up disabling SIP or poking more hole if they don't have an easy way to bypass TCC stuff.
It is not about emotion; it is about platform control. Apple limits background autonomy under the label of security, while ensuring only their first-party system frameworks get unfettered ambient access. Standard playbook.
This seems like sysadmin 101 to me. Controlling local access and who to trust was always the way. Platform vendors always enjoyed this privilege. Overriding the platform vendors software tools was done with variations kept in /usr/local/ and symlinked to over ride the vendors choices.
Full disk access is a permission you can grant to software on you Mac, that is not reserved just for Apple, and nothing Apple has said implies they have any intention of removing that class of permission. All they said is that they want users to be fully aware of the implications when granting it.
The sole fact that products from Apple and many other proprietary manufacturers receive so much attention on the discussion board called "Hacker News" is utterly ridiculous. A good example is the thread named "Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back" with 600+ points and 400+ comments on the main page today.
What's worse is that a big part of the discussion here is just worshipping closed-source from a merely consumer perspective ('...wow! what a cool shiny UI feature to manage SSH keys for only 0.99$'), as if we were on the Tom's Guide forums. And some active members here even purchase browsers and seem to be very proud about it...
Exactly. The audience used to be tinkerers, people who liked getting their hands dirty. Now it's mostly bros of one stripe or another (AI bros, finance bros, and so on).
The link 'past' in the top bar allows you to see the front page in the past.
From 2010 ... https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-10-04 that still looks similar (though I find it amusing that Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1754134 is on the front page "... My prediction (heh pun intended) is that you see enormous changes in the field when processing by GPU's becomes much more available. There are some algorithms that are simply difficult to research because labs don't have access to fast enough machines. ...")
There's certainly been some broification and the various reddit exoduses have been shifting the average user a bit.
I do believe you've got your top color set to ff007f rather than ff6600 if you're forgetting what the site looked like then.
I'm not sure where you're getting the "worshiping" part from. Though I respect your overall opinion while still disagreeing from it, it's been a very long time since HN came anywhere near worshiping Apple or even most big tech companies. Most of us simply live in the real world where using big tech wares is a soft-requirement. Using an Apple device or having interest in them makes one no more or less a "hacker", which is already a pretty subjective and contextual term to begin with.
The full disk access permission is something you give to backup software.
If you give full-disk access to Meta software running on your main computer, Meta is not going to respect your privacy.
> Friday’s [full-disk access] announcement comes two weeks after tech columnist Jason Aten said that Meta’s new general-purpose AI agent Muse sent him an unsolicited notification referencing a thread between him and a co-worker over Apple Messages. Aten said he never granted Muse permissions to read his messages and had assumed they were off-limits. Social media last week blew up with masses of people who agreed and said the incident showed that AI assistants given access to calendars, emails, messages, shopping accounts, and other resources are akin to a skill saw or other power tool. While potentially useful, they can do real damage if not used carefully.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/10/apple-changes-full-...
If you want to know why Apple is suddenly not happy about the way the full-disk access permission is being abused, look no further.
> Social media last week blew up with masses of people who agreed and said the incident showed that AI assistants given access to calendars, emails, messages, shopping accounts, and other resources are akin to a skill saw or other power tool. While potentially useful, they can do real damage if not used carefully.
This brought to mind Neal Stephenson's essay "Unix - The Hole Hawg of Operating Systems" from back in the day (1999):
> I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs, which it did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few six-inch-diameter holes through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I chucked in a new hole saw, went up to the second story, reached down between the newly installed floor joists, and began to cut through the first-floor ceiling below. Where my homeowner's drill had labored and whined to spin the huge bit around, and had stalled at the slightest obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid consistency of a spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel pipe handle and a joist, producing a few lacerations, each surrounded by a wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. It also bent the hole saw itself, though not so badly that I couldn't use it. After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror.
> But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner's product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure to envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it.
* http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html
* 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28015229
Which is why I wish Apple would support Linux out of the box on their M-series hardware.
I do not want to hand my child a Hole Hog, I want to hand them a residential power drill with the torque settings locked to a safe level. I need a fucking Hole Hog for the work I do.
There is a time and a place for every tool, and sometimes the hands holding the tool influence this more than an expert would care to admit, who instead say things like “you’re doing it wrong!” to admonish users who didn’t even know there was a difference between the tool they held and the one they needed.
> I do not want to hand my child a Hole Hog, I want to hand them a residential power drill with the torque settings locked to a safe level.
rm -rf / would like a word.
You forgot sudo and an admin entitled user’s password.
If it's really a Hole Hawg, you run as root, or at least passwordless sudo.
I thought they were calling the residential drill a hole hawg.
To your point though, not everything in Mac can be solved via root user privilege. SIP is annoying to toggle, the main issue being discussed also demonstrates why Mac OS is not the proverbial Hole Hawg as well.
> SIP is annoying to toggle, the main issue being discussed also demonstrates why Mac OS is not the proverbial Hole Hawg as well.
macOS in its default configuration may not be the HH, but if SIP removes those limitations it is still available.
As someone who (a) does some tech support for family, but also (b) uses a MacBook for sysadmining Linux servers, but kind of happy with the current balance. I don't think I've run into SIP limitations, so perhaps I'm not an 'advanced' enough user of macOS (MacPorts generally works for the 'extras' I need on top of base macOS).
Well shit, I went to verify my litany of QoL complaints that couldn’t be resolved via disabling SIP and turns out there has since been a solution for for the main one (Gatekeeper) and the remaining issues boil down to personal particularities.
So I rescind “needing” a hole hawg and correct it to “strongly prefer or desire” a hole hawg. Mainly because I shouldn’t have to rip apart a magic keyboard to embed a touch ID module into a 3D printed case for a standalone fingerprint reader module.
What about an off the shelf fingerprint reader.
What's stopping you from reverse engineering that module?
Same thing that’s stopping me from building my own computer chips using a home lithography setup and clean room.
That's a drilling rig
I'd feel about 100x safer with my child using MacOS than any Linux distro. Linux comes with much more footgun built in than any commercial OS.
How so? In what way would some immutable distro with GNOME be less safe than MacOS?
Yeah, that’s why you hand them the residential drill (Mac)
Where the analogy fails is that the relationship between doing the thing (ie. using a Hole Hawg or granting agents access to your data) and the consequences (ie. ruining your house or getting pwned) is far less obvious in the case of AI, especially if it approximately works most of the time and the failures are seemingly random.
And the folks productizing this are actively working against noticing its power by making it cutesy. It's a good product choice IFF it matches the capabilities, and it absolutely positively does not.
If you don’t understand the consequences, the Hole Hawg is not for you, and neither is the AI.
Jesus, that’s a great essay. Gibson and Stephenson are seen as the twin prophets of Cyberpunk - Gibson wrote about society, Stephenson wrote about technology. That man understands the technium better than anyone else out there.
(Bruce Sterling was the weird hippie who kept feeding interesting things into the machine to see what colors they made - without him, Cyberpunk would’ve died on the vine.)
FDA is in fact not required for backup software nor should it be. For example, Bombich is granted the com.apple.security.files.all entitlement for Carbon Copy Cloner, because backup software needs to just work without the user chancing a miss on the TCC prompt when they first set it up only to find out the app didn't backup their photos after losing all their data.
Apple stopped adding protected file-system domains for some reason, and have only expanded TCC to entail more vague and nonsense monikers. Sandboxed apps of importance like Messages, Notes, Reminders, and so on, all just end up under the "Full Disk Access" umbrella because they all store their databases in ~/Library/Containers, and FDA is really the only thing gating access to that. Apple should just start pushing the permissions one level down into that folder. Do I want to give an agent access to my Safari history, but not my messages? Too fuckin bad! No way to slice that right now, it gets full disk access and can access anything.
I think that was the initial concept of what "Full Disk Access" was supposed to be, but I've run into needing to give some of my own apps full disk access for very innocuous reasons. Recently, I wanted to build a little app to give me a Time Machine on/off switch by calling "tmutil enable/disable". A single on/off command with no need to access any of my data, but its use was gated behind needing Full Disk Access. Hopefully if Apple is rethinking Full Disk Access permissions they will rethink better ways to provide these sort of permissions.
The problem I have is that when I ssh into my mac, I want to be able to control software from the command line and having a popup authorization window that just halts the software being controlled is not good for me. I'm okay with having the authorization, but they need to make it visible to ssh users when ssh'ing in.
Counterpoint:
https://pxlnv.com/blog/macos-full-disk-access-restrictions/
> ...the uses of Full Disk Access go well beyond the category of backup apps, and it is worrisome to see Apple give it such a limited frame. I have given that permission to disk management utilities, Sketch, Terminal, and other apps I do not want to be throwing permissions requests as I move around my drives. Is Apple suggesting this capability could be limited in the future to backup applications alone? I do not like that.
If Full Disk Access were, in future, to be something that I could not grant to (for instance) the Terminal, because it is not a backup app, that would severely limit my ability to do work on a Mac, both as hobbyist and as computer professional.
I agree that the agent situation is a fairly serious concern; I just don't want to see Apple throw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater.
From Apple's statement, there doesn't seem to be any plan to remove the full disk access permission.
They want unsophisticated users to understand that they would be granting unlimited access to all of their personal data if they grant software that permission.
> We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy.
... for now. Anytime I download an unsigned binary I need to go through this song and dance of figuring out again what command I need to run to strip the quarantine tag because none of the UIs that are supposed to allow me to trust this binary work.
The company making laptops locked to an app store is Google.
Microsoft attempted to lock Windows to their app store twice, with both Windows RT and Windows S, but the market rejected both of those attempts.
Apple hasn't done that, despite claims that it's coming any day now for at least a decade.
That would be
because https://xkcd.com/979/I hope what they offer is the ability to set more granular rules, like allowing my Borg backup script to access the whole disk, but not any random Git precommit hook (for example). Given that practically all of the existing restrictive security features on macOS (for example, SIP) can be disabled, I feel confident that Apple will make hobbyist and professional use cases still possible, just requiring some extra scary messages. I’m ok with that trade off.
Another case of "This is why we can't have nice things." Application developers who feel entitled to accessing everything they can on the user's computer, without obtaining consent from the user. So, now we have to have these consent walls everywhere. Way to go, application developers.
> Way to go, application developers.
I really dislike this point of view.
1 - we're all going to suffer because meta are scum. It's not "all application developers", it's "exactly who you assumed it would be", and also too, "exactly the same scum who've spent the last 10 years working around privacy controls any possible way they can and deliberately obfuscating the choices people make around their privacy." The people who made pervert glasses and did covert web-to-app tracking by opening local ports [1] and bought sketchy spyware to track everything you did and scurried away from the light the second someone asked about it [2], [3]. And on and on and on.
Spotify has long asked for it and... they use it to copy my local mp3s onto my phone so I can listen to them away from my computer. It's awesome.
This doesn't mean that Apple isn't champing at the bit to use Meta as an excuse to screw all software developers. If Apple cared about their users, they'd do something like revoke Meta's software keys and leave responsible developers alone. Alas, Apple will obviously exploit this too :(
[1] https://localmess.github.io/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
[3] https://uk.practicallaw.thomsonreuters.com/w-040-4130?transi...
To read Ben is to glimpse the AI divide: he's honestly and emphatically choosing based on whether it makes it easier for him to use his AI agents, even if that means ditching Apple for the Zuckerberg's melee. It's that important to his personal productivity. AI-native product streams will separate from what came before, as will the people who master them.
That said, I disagree on Apple: while the UI can be perfect, it has always imperfectly been trying to do the right thing technically in concert with developers and users, which puts it in the position of imposing constraints that developers and users can relax to varying degrees: wearable and home devices (not at all), iOS (somewhat), macOS (mostly).
wrt a hacker's future: I'm still traumatized both by decades of windows reboots and virus scanning, and by decades of squeezing into Linux (just don't sleep, avoid these displays...). I'm glad Apple stuff mostly just works and ordinary people still have access to unlocked, general-purpose computers, but that might not last. Cheap AI coding might remove any financial incentive to support users programming on their own, and we'd be left with locked devices as consumers or work-only access to programmable computers (at least for the latest hardware of note). If a 40% premium for mac hardware is the price we pay for continued access, so be it.
For all of Linux's warts, it's still better than the commercial crap coming from Microsoft and Apple that focuses on 99% of consumers. For many of us at HN, Linux is a blessing and it's only getting better.
I would argue that someone who would open a remote access port to the internet with no filtering is exactly the kind of person that Apple needs to protect from themselves
Yeah, it was neat that Claude found this, but Thompson showed an almost criminal lack of security awareness by having VNC/ARD open to the internet
Why does Apple need to protect anyone from themselves? This is the problem with commercial vendors creeping in computing freedom. It is exactly this mentality that people shouldn't be the ones responsible for the hardware and software they own and operate which erodes that freedom.
Because people will shoot themselves in the foot if you give them a shotgun. A big part of why the Mac as a platform blossomed in the late 2000s forward was because it was much less likely you'd get hacked by clicking the wrong link or just opening an email than it was on a Windows machine (among other reasons)
And, all of that said, Apple hasn't said anything about not letting people have full access to their disks. Just that you're going to have to be very intentional, click through a very scary warning, to do so. Happy to do that to prevent my mom or dad from accidentally opening up their machine to every hacker in Belarus or worse yet Facebook
> Because people will shoot themselves in the foot if you give them a shotgun.
Correct. This is why gun safety is taught. Try and bring up banning shotguns in the US and see what happens.
I don't think "let's just stick with how things work in the actual firearms industry" is what I was going for or a sane position to take on just about anything
The thing is, Apple customers typically don't want that kind of power and responsibility. They view the limitations as a liberating force.
When my mother in law switched from (XP-era) Windows to OS X, she expressed a profound sense of relief that she didn't have to worry so much about accidentally breaking it. She has absolutely no desire to learn computers well enough to understand a system that gives her more control. In her experience it never enabled her to do anything particularly relevant to her own interests, and mostly accomplished the complete opposite by leaving her slightly afraid to do anything. My own efforts to try and explain her computer problems and how to avoid them in the future did not help; they only served to communicate to her that the computer was indeed complicated and scary.
Unfortunately, it's often the case that the blast radius of the footgun (ouch, mixed weaponry metaphor) is bigger than the person who's holding the gun, and other users' security may be compromised...
Because people have lives to get on with. People need to use computers. People have better things to do with their time than spend weekends learning about the details of internet security. It is an elitist position to say that protections erode freedom. In my ICE car the engineers have specified the grade of oil that I need to use. Certainly if I knew the details of the engine, the weather it will be used in, and other factors I could choose alternate oil grades. Are my freedoms being eroded by grade of oil being mandated?
For the exact same reason Microsoft created Windows File Protection.
If you don't like System Integrity Protection on your Mac, you can turn it off and YOLO to your heart's content.
> The question, however, is whether what they are designed for is the future I am barreling towards, one where agentic abstraction both renders traditional interfaces relics
I think he was burying the lede but glad he finally posed the question.
I think it's a bigger risk factor for Apple than is generally assumed. If consumers get used to the freedom but endemic spying of products like Muse, Apple may have a hard time sticking to their privacy and security mandate.
From Apple's statement, they want to be sure users understand that they are handing Meta access to all of their personal data if they grant Muse (or other AI agents) the full-disk access permission.
> Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems—including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history—without users’ full knowledge and understanding. For communication apps, this can also compromise the privacy of the people users are communicating with.
As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy.
> the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially.
This is not going to end well for everyone involved - especially for the user.
But that's the case on all platforms with any LLM agent being given full access.
There will be an adjustment period where users will learn of the risks - hopefully without much harm occurring.
> "We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access"
This "you are entering the wilderness, I will not be able to protect you anymore if you proceed" framing reminds me of the alternative AppStore case, where Apple (and Google) applied scare-tactics in the UI to discourage users from giving permissions to alternative stores.
> scare-tactics in the UI
This is the only weapon they have when governments have forced them to open their doors to the scary world outside.
Or the scary warnings today against disabling SIP, repeated by forum users anywhere it’s discussed.
Which happens to be the only way to disable the TCC permission dialogs OP complains about. Guess the warnings worked well enough that no one knows that anymore.
I know SIP as a telephony protocol, what are you referring to here?
> System Integrity Protection is a security technology designed to help prevent potentially malicious software from modifying protected files and folders on your Mac. System Integrity Protection restricts the root user account and limits the actions that the root user can perform on protected parts of the Mac operating system.
Before System Integrity Protection, the root user had no permission restrictions, so it could access any system folder or app on your Mac. Software obtained root-level access when you entered your administrator name and password to install the software. That allowed the software to modify or overwrite any system file
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102149
Thank you. I see its an Apple thing which is why I guess I havent heard of it.
Windows File Protection is in the same vein.
There are no much user can do once they "clearly understand these risk".
The risk of having human assistant can be mitigated by background check, insurance and legal recourse. We have none of these for AI agents.
In that case, it will be their own dang fault. Modern MacOS is a mess of update nags, unwanted notifications, and permissions prompts. We want sandboxing and security patches but the UX around it is abominable.
It's the constant risk for Apple that its customer base voluntarily invites any company to interact with them directly, because it's Apple's prerogative to broker the access to its users.
So as always, for the sake of "privacy" Apple needs to take action to protect the users from "themselves", and make it undesirable to grant others the same access Apple has...
I think the observation Ben is making, is that Apple no longer has a grasp on the future purchases in the market. He makes it explicit with this quote: "I can, for the first time, envision a future where I don’t buy Apple by default." It used to be a given that we would refresh every 3-4 years, thats probably no longer guaranteed.
Observationally, I would argue we've all been expecting this for this for a long time. Every year Apple has raised the price of allegiance and every year we've paid it, waiting for products like the framework laptop or certain linux distros to become mature. We're still not there yet, but how much longer until there is real competition in the personal computer market?
My next laptop might be a Snapdragon Elite X2 if they get good Linux support. It's probably going to be comparable to macs in battery and CPU power.
https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/10/snapdragon-x2-linux
If it doesn't support Linux well, I'm not buying it. It's that simple.
What I find most surprising, is that I don't think we got any sort of timeline from Apple on this change and its very vague (which just fuels articles like this).
So did this initiative within Apple just start and we could be looking at this change coming in Mac 28?
I don't remember another time of an announcement like this from Apple of a major change with so little information, though I could be wrong or hint of when.
Regarding the concern, while I do hope that there is still a way to grant actual full disk access to some applications. Even Apple called out a non controversial need for something like that, backup software. I can also think of security scanning software, a lot of businesses have those deployed to corporate Mac's. I do also think that better controls around it, especially in this age of vibe coded apps that never actually think about security or actively hostile companies like meta.
“this vulnerability has been observed on multiple systems on which port 5900 was accessible from the Internet”
We’ve known that improperly secured ports and non-firewalled machines get popped. When will people learn?
I know let’s put our power plants and water treatment out there with open ports too. Why should endusers have all the fun?
Did the author have his Mac exposed to the internet and not behind a firewall? How did his screen sharing port 5900 get accessed if he was behind a physical firewall/home router?
He port forwarded 5900 to his Mac.
> This system is annoying but manageable on your primary Mac; it’s a disaster on a headless Mac running agents, for two reasons. First, agents write new programs all of the time, and in my case, those programs need access to devices on my network (SMB shares, for example, trigger a TCC warning). What I need is a permission layer for agents, not the programs they create; TCC is operating at the wrong level of abstraction.
Doesn’t that already exist? If I give Terminal.app access to the entire disk, CLI tools started by the app (indirectly: Terminal.app runs a shell, and the shell runs the tools) have that access, too.
And I don’t think that’s because Apple gives Terminal.app preferential access. Google tells me that works for iTerm, too.
Or would it mean agents need to do some special thing to launch tools?
I think some standards org needs to define comprehensive agent permissions model first before the OS raises the abstraction to agent level authorization.
Might be that you'll need LLMs to define the model, as LLMs will immediately drive a truck through any hole the standard left in by accident. They're really good at this.
Having 5900 hot to wan.. He wrote an article to tell the world that he doesn't understand basic networking.
Forgive me for being the idiot in the room but is the argument:
1. 5900 was always known to be an extra unsafe port to have open
2. all ports should be assumed unsafe without explicit vetting
I'm assuming the argument being made is (2), but it really is a sad safe of affairs because use cases from time to time do involve having ports hot.
Or should things be taken one step further to *always* use a vpn or similar?
Yeah, the dude wrote a 3,500-word article trashing Apple when he can't even follow the most basic security practice in the first place.
I got confused for a second how Claude Code and agents are related to this piece. Of course they aren't. Anyone with a half brain about securing their system would never run into any of this in the first place. Hiring Claude Code to do scanning every half an hour is such a waste of tokens.
You know he did the 'chef's kiss' when his frontier model that he pays a subscription on completed this article.
The 'built a server that's going to run linux' line confused me. gOiNg tO? This boy didn't have 20 minutes to write a usb, shred the disks in live boot and install?
Maybe Claude told him it was OK.
I'm not sure why a writer needs swarms of agents in the first place.
The vuln required "port 5900 was accessible from the Internet"
Why would anyone open up random ports (or even all ports) to the internet?
it's a vnc port, it'd also require the router to have it opened. Reading the article I think the user opened it themselves. It does get opened automagically on the mac side when screen sharing is turned on.
> The problem is that for my particular use case — a headless, always-on Mac Mini that I primarily access from other computers and my phone through the ChatGPT and Claude apps — macOS is incredibly hostile
> As noted by the NCSC, the vulnerability is being exploited when port 5900 is exposed to the Internet. When screen sharing is turned on, the macOS firewall opens the port. Routers and dedicated firewalls generally block the port unless configured to override that setting.
> Obviously I should have — and will be — using a VPN going forward (the foundation of my entire approach to security is Tailscale); what I will note, however, is that TCC basically leaves me no choice but to have screen sharing enabled if I want to actually use my Mac Mini in the way I want to use it. I use screen-sharing constantly — including from my phone — and almost every time it’s to click “OK” on a stupid prompt that I’ve long since stopped taking seriously.
> Obviously I should have — and will be — using a VPN going forward
That's my takeaway from the article. I have trouble understanding how the author managed to extrapolate all these things about Apple from an obvious oversight on their part. I would never write a 3,000-word article about how bad someone else is because of an issue I caused for myself.
Software WILL have bugs and vulnerabilities, regardless of whether it's an OS or user application, whether it's from Apple or another company, or the update frequency/mechanism. If you can't even follow the most basic security practice on your part, you simply don't have any authority to discuss security otherwise.
Disagree.
Apple's remote access feature, that you would make remotely accessible for obvious reasons, apparently had a critical authentication bug.
Apple did not ship a security patch for this, allowing the vulnerability to be exploited a week later despite "automatically install security updates" being on.
Yes, OP could have prevented this by putting an additional VPN authentication layer in front of the Mac's built-in remote access.
That doesn't excuse the mistakes on Apple's part.
> That doesn't excuse the mistakes on Apple's part.
Let's first establish that Apple definitely has a stake in this.
How long they can come up with a fix and then distribute them, that's a question. You can't expect any company to fix a vulnerability within 5min. Whether one week is too long or their delivery mechanism is good, I can't tell, and I don't think there is a standard in the entire industry.
That doesn't mean it's useful to write an article about "I didn't do my part BUT you are too slow". Even if Apple somehow fixes this within an hour of the disclosure and delivers the update, with the bad configuration, the machine is still vulnerable within that window. Does that change the nature of the narrative?
I don't think anyone criticized the timing of the patch.
But I find it egregious that they didn't roll it out as a security update at all, which is why it was not automatically installed in OP's case, even though the fix was already available.
I mean, what else requires a hotfix via security update if not a fatal flaw in your remote access authentication leading to full root access, that is actively being exploited in the wild?
Also, it's not really on the user to gate remote access behind an additional firewall and authentication layer. This is something that just has to work securely.
If it doesn't, that's understandable, but still hardly the user's fault.
> what else requires a hotfix via security update if not a fatal flaw in your remote access authentication leading to full root access, that is actively being exploited in the wild?
> Also, it's not really on the user to gate remote access behind an additional firewall and authentication layer. This is something that just has to work securely.
About that, I have a bridge to sell.
> I would never write a 3,000-word article about how bad someone else is because of an issue I caused for myself.
Welcome to hacker news!
In this case, the author literally writes blog posts for a living. This just happened to be a free article, and, well, you get what you pay for.
The thing is that many of these people think they know what they are doing and do not think about security, only how awesome LLMs and AI make their experience until something bad happens.
Even though this was a valid critical bug [1], you need to enable screen sharing and allow connections to and from port 5900 on your router for a remote person to be able to exploit this.
Any security conscious person would probably be using a VPN (Wireguard or Tailscale) to prevent something like this, in the first place.
> almost every time it’s to click “OK” on a stupid prompt that I’ve long since stopped taking seriously.
The line above tells you how seriously this person takes security prompts.
[1]: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-65400
I opened my SSH port to the internet back in the day because I could tunnel my internet through it to avoid network blocks. (sshuttle my beloved)
Observation:
> Hopefully Apple has in mind a solution to this situation that will still enable knowledgeable power users to confirm agreement to a sufficiently scary warning and put their Macs in a state similar to what we have today. I worry. What alleviates my worst fears is the knowledge that every technical user at Apple itself needs to use their Mac as the powerful Unix workstation OS that it is. Some of us need dangerously powerful tools. Most Mac users, however, do not — and don’t realize they’re using a dangerously powerful Unix workstation with a very friendly (literal) face.
* https://daringfireball.net/2026/10/apple_full_disk_access
> What alleviates my worst fears is the knowledge that every technical user at Apple itself needs to use their Mac as the powerful Unix workstation OS that it is.
What Gruber didn't realize is that Apple gives its engineers special internal tools that can bypass the restrictions we on the outside have to suffer.
I'm sure it's also the case that internal development macOS builds are compiled differently than public release builds. They basically have to be for Apple engineers to modify them during development.
> restrictions we on the outside have to suffer
We can disable SIP with a reboot to recovery and a single command. That doesn't seem like too high a bridge to cross and probably as good as any internal tool, if that isn't what they get in the first place.
> We can disable SIP
But this eliminates all SIP protections, for example, as discussed in the article, preventing Meta Muse from reading your Messages db.
Muse doesn't need Full Disk Access if SIP is disabled.
Which system integrity protection are you worried about missing? Muse being able to exfiltrate the contents of your messages db doesn’t compromise system integrity to begin with. It being able to write arguably does, but this whole conversation was about how to grant it full disk access in the future anyway.
And OP had SIP enabled, but his system still got compromised with a remote exploit.
AIUI, SIP protects "/" but not "/Users" (macOS' $HOME base). All your private data is in $HOME, so that's why Muse could get it even with SIP.
Sort of; SIP originally was simply meant to protect /System from root. But nowadays, it's more used for system attestation. Which in turn is used by the OS to decide how to ask for and enforce certain user permissions and sandbox profiles.
> SIP protects "/" but not "/Users" (macOS' $HOME base).
> that's why Muse could get it even with SIP.
Both of these assumptions are mistaken.
> Muse being able to exfiltrate the contents of your messages db doesn’t compromise system integrity to begin with.
I care more about the integrity of my personal privacy than I do about the integrity of the "system". The point of the system is to serve me.
> And OP had SIP enabled, but his system still got compromised with a remote exploit.
Nobody said that SIP magically prevents macOS bugs and security vulnerabilities.
Protection from the sort of malware OP was hit with is the most commonly cited dire warning against disabling SIP. I just assumed that was also the reason you were against disabling SIP in order to grant permissions to software you intentionally installed.
> Protection from the sort of malware OP was hit with is the most commonly cited dire warning against disabling SIP. I just assumed that was also the reason you were against disabling SIP in order to grant permissions to software you intentionally installed.
No. The confusion here is that the Stratechery post combines multiple stories. There was a macOS screen sharing vulnerability, now fixed. The vulnerability existed even with SIP enabled, and that vulnerability is how Ben Thompson's Mac was hacked.
The question was, why did Thompson's Mac have the screen sharing port open to the internet, and that's when Thompson explained that the Mac was running an agent.
Coincidentally, Apple published a developer note on Friday about upcoming changes to Full Disk Access, which mentioned AI agents. Apple did not give any specific reason for this change, but presumably the inspiration was a very recent public controversy initiated by a journalist whose Messages database on macOS was read and uploaded by the Meta Muse app. Muse and similar AI apps request Full Disk Access to access all of the user's information. Without SIP, these apps would be able to suck up all of your data without permission.
If you're arguing that SIP isn't a useful defense against malware, I agree there.
Sandboxing full disk reads is orthogonal to what SIP actually provides. It's entirely possible for an unsandboxed binary to slurp your private data even with SIP enabled.
> If you're arguing that SIP isn't a useful defense against malware
No? I'm not.
SIP is of course not a universal defense against every possible kind of attack, but did anyone ever expect it to be?
> Sandboxing full disk reads is orthogonal to what SIP actually provides.
No, because again, as I already said, disabling SIP also disables some TCC privacy protections.
> It's entirely possible for an unsandboxed binary to slurp your private data even with SIP enabled.
Not the data protected by TCC.
What about all the stuff they've done to keep it open:
- Per-install boot security policies
- Custom kernel boot (kmutil configure-boot)
- Raw-image boot mode
- XNU source releases
- Disabling SIP
- Disabling the Signed System Volume
- Third-party kernel extensions
- Developer ID distribution and notarisation
- Gatekeeper "Open Anyway" override
- Hypervisor.framework
- Virtualization.framework
- Rosetta for Linux VMs
- Nested virtualisation
- macOS guest provisioning
- DiskImageKit
- Custom Virtio devices
- Containerization framework
> What about all the stuff they've done to keep it open
I don't understand the purpose of your reply?
One of your examples is "Disabling SIP", but you're replying to a thread that has already been discussing this very topic, so it makes no sense to ask us "what about" that.
> - Third-party kernel extensions
Deprecated: https://developer.apple.com/support/kernel-extensions/
The issue is really the difficulty of using macOS as an expert user, and this has become significantly more difficult over the years. You mention "Developer ID distribution and notarisation", but both of those are actually restrictions that were added later to a previously open system. Notarization in particular has become a major pain for developers. Also "Gatekeeper Open Anyway override" has become significantly more difficult for users over the years.
> I don't understand the purpose of your reply?
to illustrate, counter to the HN narrative, they've actually done a lot to keep the platform open to hackers and hobbyists.
Sure, remove disabling SIP from the list, the others still stand and are quite compelling IMO.
Fair enough on the kernel extensions.
I take your point(s) but the doom about the Mac turning into iOS and the terminal being taken away is unfounded.
> to illustrate, counter to the HN narrative, they've actually done a lot to keep the platform open to hackers and hobbyists.
My comment that you replied to was not about the HN narrative. Thus, I still don't understand the purpose of your reply.
It's like how all of the retail floor models are managed by Jamf Pro but you won't see an MDM profile in the Settings app.
> I understand that people are nervous about giving these agents access to one’s computer — as I noted, the Mac Mini in question has nothing on it except for Codex and Claude — but in this case you could make the case that I would have been in much more trouble had I not had an agent running persistently.
If the burglar breaks in through the cat door but she wakes you to let you know, did the cat make you more safe?
might depend on the cat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKwKysk5rEw
> What’s better, using a structured reminders app that you have to check, or simply being reminded directly by an agent? In truth the answer will likely vary by person, but it’s worth pointing out that Apple is so married to the app paradigm that they probably never even considered the alternative.
This was the most interesting part to me. I wonder what this divide looks like in the real world. I have a hard time believing this is true for everyone:
> I don’t want a different UI per app, when I have at my disposal true UI — the Universal Interface for everything digital.
I have a Macmini purposely for Codex to do whatever. Nothing personal on it. It’s been a productivity boost 1000x for me. I screen share in, give it some tasks, tell it to install software, run brew whatever, use QGIS and other complex software and email me screenshots. Astonishing.
But I’m worried because of this and other guardrails all of that will be impossible or much harder in the future.
Couldn’t you give agents access to the screen sharing software to see the TCC prompts?
TCC prompts have some degree of "synthetic click" detection. It's been a while since I've tried to click "Allow" with osascript.
Right, but that isn’t what I was suggesting. TFA - which I read - says the author uses remote screen technology to click through the prompts.
I wonder what apple does when confronted with software that auto-approves the TCC prompt via a VNC connection to localhost.
If there’s some protections that prevent it from happening via localhost, it feels like the next step is to proxy through another host on the LAN.
Heck, I wonder if someone’s already written an app that’ll connect to VNC, look for any permission prompts, and approve. His agent software could just poke it anytime it thinks it’s blocked.
What I took home from reading this article is Apple NOT deploying security updates as security updates. That to me is SO stupid on their part—coercing to the point updates by withholding important security updates.
The author themselves say "I am admittedly being pedantic here" to that point.
You don't want a backup vulnerable to "reading iMessage" either - maybe they should just encrypt these things at rest.
I do feel since I use hermes on my work windows computer and grok bot in the cloud on everything else that computer use is so useful and important, but I'm also worried that Apple will not be a good choice for that.
Apple can’t see a future where Mac isn’t like iPhone. They need a 30% cut of all software revenue, want a 30% cut of any AI tokens you use, and will steal 30% of your time as a software developer developing for your own account any way you can.
This. I'm quite confident that they look at the Mac as a "profit-leaking" product they gradually need to bring on-par with their other products, but can't make any big steps to avoid alienating the userbase.
But I'm sure the day of the iOS-based iMac will come, and pandora's box will be opened. Businesses will love it, especially those with Kiosk use-cases, and not before long we will read everywhere (including here) how superior the security is to a Mac for everyday use...
They must have a prototype of an iPad somewhere that can run both iOS and Mac software but they are too comfortable with their current product positioning. I thought Microsoft had a good idea with Windows 8, I mean, I don’t travel with a laptop anymore, just an iPad and wireless mouse and keyboard. If I need to use desktop software I use RDP or something like that. I go to a hackathon and I have both the sleekest and the beefiest hardware. It’s great. An iPad could give a similar experience with local compute if only Apple would let it.
But to back into it…. OpenClaw amd Muse and stuff give people a real reason to buy a Mac but Apple doesn’t like it.
> "OpenClaw amd Muse and stuff give people a real reason to buy a Mac but Apple doesn’t like it."
Yeah, because a year down the road they might give the same people a reason to upgrade to another box, not from Apple.
Apple needs to ensure that they stand in the middle of every supplier relationship their customers have.
That's quite difficult when they don't provide direct value to both, so the natural conclusion is for Apple to present itself as a care-taker, the only one who prevents the user from taking any harm...
That’s a pretty elaborate and conspiratorial way to say “Apple isn’t especially interested in market segments they’re not trying to serve”. Which I think is true of most companies?
It's meant to say "Apple prefers if companies are not able to enter relationships with Apple customers without Apple being in the middle", which is not typical for most companies
It’s true of any two-sided marketplace, especially when part of the marketplace’s value prop is safety (see: eBay)
> I thought Microsoft had a good idea with Windows 8
Get out! Desktop are not mobile devices and there is still need for them. Microsoft learnt this the hard way.
Well I hear a lot of “silly boomer, don’t you know a computer is a computer and a phone is a phone” but many whippersnappers don’t know that Von Newman proved all computers are equivalent in theory and video game emulation proves they are in practice.
I think the barriers that exist depend on path dependence and other accidents of development. The laptop has a hinge and a trackpad that help you when you are flying on a plane. 2-in-1s drove stewardesses crazy because they couldn’t figure out if you had to stow them for takeoff. For that matter battery sizes are limited because of the needs of that industry which might seem justified if you live in NYC and can fly to London for what it less to costs to fly from my small town to NYC. Maybe if they’d invest in my community I’d care what they think but I think it’s unjust.
All the time I use a cheap plastic clip and a cheap Bluetooth mouse and keyboard and RDP into a monster computer from my tablet. If I have a real desk or table it’s fine, if you really have to put your laptop on your lap that hinge looks like genius. I’ll grant the 2-in-1 can be demoed at CES and the Bluetooth-based system can’t because they have too many devices in too small a space for Bluetooth to be reliable.
Even if I don’t have the mouse and keyboard I can still do a lot with the touchscreen.
The worst thing Win 8 revealed was that you could have the ‘windows’ keys on computer keyboards for almost 20 years and nobody noticed because…. It looks like an ad and people think anything that looks like an ad “just doesn’t work” (as opposed to “doesn’t just work”). If you were missing the start button you could just push that button but people treated that like putting their hand in the toilet.
The Mac has had the ability to run iPad apps for quite a few years now, since Apple Silicon. Unfortunately it is opt-in for developers and most don't. I wonder if it will become non-optional (or at least opt-out) with the touchscreen MBP rumoured for this fall.
I think that's the unification route they are most likely to take, hopefully along with a thinner/smaller MacBook design and built-in cellular.
They've taken so many swings at the iPad Pro (both hardware and software), and it has never been as good as the MacBook.
> An iPad could give a similar experience with local compute if only Apple would let it.
It does, it's called the MacBook Neo.
iPad sales have been rather stagnant in the last few years, while they made bank with their low-cost laptop. On a purely conceptual level I don't think they're gonna merge the two anytime soon, even if they will probably start sharing the very same logic board from their next revision.
Stagnant because (1) they don’t want to cannibalize iPhone and Mac and (2) competitors have failed to do make tablets that do a lot more than become e-waste. Microsoft had a reason to make the transition as carriers didn’t allow them to make a phone platform but their other enemies like Dell, HP and Lenovo had neither the motivation nor engineering skills to come along.
> Businesses will love it
businesses can already lock down your mac so you can't use it inappropriately.
I'm reminded of the guy who ran afoul of google, and all of a sudden all his google devices got forced software updates and started doing things.
it is sad, really.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
>...but can't make any big steps to avoid alienating the userbase.
I think the way this could work is by linking certain capabilities to MDM or a developer program membership. Organisations and people who really need it would still be able to get it but regular users would not.
You forgot, they want 30% (or more) of your files to be inaccessible by you, so you can't access the data/media you've downloaded in ways apple doesn't like, or disable apple daemons that collect telemetry or whatever.
What does this have to do with the article, exactly?
Author's misguided choice of platform for running a headless server.
Unlike 30 years ago, now I see anti-developer as a feature for end users. The current trend is that big corporation developers just abuse any system to squeeze profits/information from end users as much as possible.
In this case apple do this because Meta are abusing.
I don't think that's fair, they've spent a lot of time and effort ensuring the Mac is still an open/UNIX like platform, including (where they didn't have to):
- Per-install boot security policies
- Custom kernel boot (kmutil configure-boot)
- Raw-image boot mode
- XNU source releases
- Disabling SIP
- Disabling the Signed System Volume
- Third-party kernel extensions
- Developer ID distribution and notarisation
- Gatekeeper "Open Anyway" override
- Hypervisor.framework
- Virtualization.framework
- Rosetta for Linux VMs
- Nested virtualisation
- macOS guest provisioning
- DiskImageKit
- Custom Virtio devices
- Containerization framework
These are basically all things that an engineering org can justify as necessary for some reason but can immediately disappear when leadership announces a change in strategy.
Not to take away from your point too much - this is a significant amount of work that shows their current stance towards maintaining the mac as a premium development platform. But I imagine they will start to split this - lower cost SKUs will get the iOS-ified OS while "Pro" SKUs will get (some of) the above and can still install homebrew, to prevent a full developer revolt.
Techies will figure out how to "jailbreak" the lower SKUs to unlock the full experience and the amount of people that follow through with that will round to 0%. Tech businesses will buy the >$3k Pros for their devs.
"Everyone" will be "happy".
> Apple can’t see a future where Mac isn’t like iPhone.
Can you blame them? Their managers cannot code, so they need something else that is "useful" to do. And the one thing they find useful is to increase revenue.
Indeed, it's all beancounters and lawyers now, just as with any other run-of-the-mill monster corporation.
If the main to run Apple computers is their hardware, why not to run it with Linux. Aside from better filesystems (Theo tests were shocking to me, how bad FS you guys have), you would get better compartmenalization and I believe better security. What's missing?
Linux.
There is no Linux that will run on anyhing newer than M4 and even that is incomplete.
Sure there is. Containers and VMs. That's how you properly isolate ai workloads.
Linux VM guest, macOS host.
Better design in terms of resource isolation and control, too.
I use krunai. It is not quite as flexible as some people probably want (strongly linked to a specific non-systemd version of Debian 13), but there are many other options as well, such as Lume, Virtualization.framework, etc.
Much better than wrangling server code via Apple nonsense, and there are no real downsides after you've done the integration/deployment work once, assuming you are not building on some closed source thing that only runs on macOS.
> Apple doesn’t seem too happy about agents
I don't get this reaction to Apple making Full Disk Access more explicit. Whether they're "happy" or "sad" about agents doesn't seem responsive at all.
Kinda seems like whenever you spend 10 seconds thinking about the average user, social media gets angry. The quoted justification by Apple seems reasonable.
Being happy or not has nothing to do with it, in my understanding as well. Removing full system access from non-deterministic tools prone to prompt injections seems like the most obvious thing to do. There's a reason I run all my projects in rootless isolated containers these days. There has never really been "trust" in software, but the lack of trust is a lot more obvious these days.
Is the conclusion of this that Apple shouldn't add robust and hard to automate around privacy guards because we should all just do as he does - use a dedicated Mac mini for agents with no personal files on for privacy?
I assume any computer connected to my LAN is also a dedicated attack vector for everything on my LAN in case of compromise.
Exposing any port directly to the Internet is a huge risk these days—at minimum I'd put a very strong firewall in front, and unless it's serving the general public, switch to a non standard port. It's not much but would prevent the dumb automated scripts that operate on standard ports.
I feel like this article was all over the place. Also, this person was really running a macOS box raw on the Internet, no firewall, nothing? :/
He also had that computer configured to download system updates automatically, but not to install them.
On the plus side, at least he didn't run the AI agent on the computer with all of his personal data.
He had enabled a setting that says "Install [...] security updates". If enabling that setting does not lead to the system installing security updates, that's on Apple.
System updates also include security fixes.
Which is not apparent if you give them an explicitly labelled separate toggle.
I guess Apple could do what Microsoft did and take away the user's ability to control system updates.
However, this user made the choice to turn off the installation of system updates manually, based on a false assumption.
This user turned off the installation of system updates, because Apple labelled a control incorrectly.
"Thank god the causes told me about the effects!"
My rule: if a company, in any way, forces you, the user, within reason to do anything you don't want to do, or prevent you from doing anything you would want to do, then ditch that company ASAP.
The entire iOS/MacOS schism already says enough.
At this point Windows has become more usable than MacOS.
No it hasn't and it's not even close.
- Guy writing to you from Windows 11 with multiple Macbook Pros next to him.
> Then there is the fact that macOS is a certified Unix system
They didn't renew Golden Gate's UNIX 03 certification this year:
https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
> What I need is a permission layer for agents, not the programs they create; TCC is operating at the wrong level of abstraction.
Or... you are operating your computer at the wrong level of abstraction. It was made for use by a real intelligence.
We already have all these permission layers too. SELinux and Windows NT have existed for a long time.
So has macOS. It’s just a matter that the agents don’t bother to use the existing permission layers.
So all we need to do is get malware to play by the rules. :)
“If Woody had only gone right to the police(used a vpn), this would not have happened.”
It’s not like a VPN is some arcane knowledge. I guarantee Claude would have told him or practically yelled at him if he asked how he could have secured his mac exposed to the open internet.
Glad he actually acknowledged it and is getting tailscale or similar.
Related:
Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937631
I'm missing a key point: why does the author say TCC is implicitly to blame for his Mac being hacked?
TCC throws up vista-style warning prompts everywhere, so to bypass them he opened up remote desktop so he could manually dismiss them, which then got exploited via a recent pre-auth bug in ARD.
If the TCC prompts could be dismissable some other way (e.g. via CLI with root permission) presumably he wouldn't have resorted to such measures. I sort of see the point, the lesson from Vista is that if you put up annoying obstacles people are going to the easiest workaround, bulldozing over them rather than putting up with them. People will end up disabling SIP or poking more hole if they don't have an easy way to bypass TCC stuff.
Thanks for that explanation, got it. Yes, they seem very Vista UAC-like in usability fail.
Giving a text assumption engine root access to the world, "hey little clanker, heard you understand 10% of every topic, go nuts."
It is not about emotion; it is about platform control. Apple limits background autonomy under the label of security, while ensuring only their first-party system frameworks get unfettered ambient access. Standard playbook.
This seems like sysadmin 101 to me. Controlling local access and who to trust was always the way. Platform vendors always enjoyed this privilege. Overriding the platform vendors software tools was done with variations kept in /usr/local/ and symlinked to over ride the vendors choices.
Well, you don't even really need symlinks. You can just adjust the order of locations in $PATH
The symlink works when the preferred tool has a different name from the vendor supplied tool being overridden.
Full disk access is a permission you can grant to software on you Mac, that is not reserved just for Apple, and nothing Apple has said implies they have any intention of removing that class of permission. All they said is that they want users to be fully aware of the implications when granting it.
My expectations aren’t high when we’re talking about opening up VNC to the public Internet.
Doesn’t port forwarding to an ssh tunnel work? I’ve used TeamViewer just for convenience.
maybe there is a reason they are called... system frameworks?
The sole fact that products from Apple and many other proprietary manufacturers receive so much attention on the discussion board called "Hacker News" is utterly ridiculous. A good example is the thread named "Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back" with 600+ points and 400+ comments on the main page today.
What's worse is that a big part of the discussion here is just worshipping closed-source from a merely consumer perspective ('...wow! what a cool shiny UI feature to manage SSH keys for only 0.99$'), as if we were on the Tom's Guide forums. And some active members here even purchase browsers and seem to be very proud about it...
I will never understand comments like this.
You are on the wrong site if you think that HN was ever a bastion of the hyper OSS mindset.
This is a site powered by and run by one of the arms of a startup incubator/investor. It has always been clear on that.
Just because it has “hacker” in the name doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Exactly. The audience used to be tinkerers, people who liked getting their hands dirty. Now it's mostly bros of one stripe or another (AI bros, finance bros, and so on).
The link 'past' in the top bar allows you to see the front page in the past.
From 2010 ... https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-10-04 that still looks similar (though I find it amusing that Ask HN: So what's new in the world of A.I.? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1754134 is on the front page "... My prediction (heh pun intended) is that you see enormous changes in the field when processing by GPU's becomes much more available. There are some algorithms that are simply difficult to research because labs don't have access to fast enough machines. ...")
There's certainly been some broification and the various reddit exoduses have been shifting the average user a bit.
I do believe you've got your top color set to ff007f rather than ff6600 if you're forgetting what the site looked like then.
Isn't the AI stuff tinkering?
I've certainly thrown together more software and automations over the last year than I have in the other ~15 years since I started programming.
It's never been so fun.
I'm not sure where you're getting the "worshiping" part from. Though I respect your overall opinion while still disagreeing from it, it's been a very long time since HN came anywhere near worshiping Apple or even most big tech companies. Most of us simply live in the real world where using big tech wares is a soft-requirement. Using an Apple device or having interest in them makes one no more or less a "hacker", which is already a pretty subjective and contextual term to begin with.
If you are interested in tech outside of consumer electronics lobsters is a good alternative to here.