> I know people really dislike how Apple restricts your freedom to use their software in any way they don't intend. But this is one of the times where they shine.
Yes, the problem here is that the system owners had too much control over their systems.
No, no, that's the EXACT OPPOSITE of what happened. The problem is Crowdstrike had too much control of systems -- arguing that we should instead give that control to Apple is just swapping out who's holding the gun.
> arguing that we should instead give that control to Apple is just swapping out who's holding the gun.
apple wrote the OS, in this scenario they're already holding a nuke, and getting the gun out of crowdstrike's hands is in fact a win.
it is self-evident that 300 countries having nukes is less safe than 5 countries having them. Getting nukes (kernel modules) out of the hands of randos is a good thing even if the OS vendor still has kernel access (which they couldn't possibly not have) and might have problems of their own. IDK why that's even worthy of having to be stated.
don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, incremental improvements in the state of things is still improvement. there is a silly amount of black-and-white thinking around "popular" targets like apple and nvidia (see: anything to do with the open-firmware-driver) etc.
"sure google is taking all your personal data and using it to target ads to your web searches, but apple also has sponsored/promoted apps in the app store!" is a similarly trite level of discourse that is nonetheless tolerated when it's targeted at the right brand.
This is good nuance to add to the conversation, thanks.
I think in most cases you have to trust some group of parties. As an individual you likely don't have enough time and expertise to fully validate everything that runs on your hardware.
Do you trust the OSS community, hardware vendors, OS vendors like IBM, Apple, M$, do you trust third party vendors like Crowdstrike?
For me, I prefer to minimize the number of parties I have to trust, and my trust is based on historical track record. I don't mind paying and giving up functionality.
Even if you've trusted too many people, and been burned, we should design our systems such that you can revoke that trust after the fact and become un-burned.
Having to boot into safe mode and remove the file is a pretty clumsy remediation. Better would be to boot into some kind of trust-management interface and distrust cloudstrike updates dated after July 17, then rebuild your system accordingly (this wouldn't be difficult to implement with nix).
Of course you can only benefit from that approach if you trust the end user a bit more than we typically do. Physical access should always be enough to access the trust management interface, anything else is just another vector for spooky action at a distance.
It is some mix of priorities along the frontier, with Apple being on the significantly controlling end such that I wouldn't want to bother. Your trust should also be based on prediction, and giving a major company even more control over what your systems are allowed to do has been historically bad and only gets worse. Even if Apple is properly ethical now (I'm skeptical, I think they've found a decently sized niche and that most of their users wouldn't drop them even if they moved to significantly higher levels of telemetry, due to being a status good in part), there's little reason to give them that power in perpetuity. Removing that control when it is absued hasn't gone well in the past.
Yes, the problem here is that the system owners had too much control over their systems.
No, no, that's the EXACT OPPOSITE of what happened. The problem is Crowdstrike had too much control of systems -- arguing that we should instead give that control to Apple is just swapping out who's holding the gun.