Your Computer Isn't Yours [MacOS]

Johnatan56

Johnatan56

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It’s here. It happened. Did you notice?


I’m speaking, of course, of the world that Richard Stallman predicted in 1997. The one Cory Doctorow also warned us about.


On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored.


It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. Lots of people didn’t realize this, because it’s silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you’re offline, but today the server got really slow and it didn’t hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone’s apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet.


Because it does this using the internet, the server sees your IP, of course, and knows what time the request came in. An IP address allows for coarse, city-level and ISP-level geolocation, and allows for a table that has the following headings:


Date, Time, Computer, ISP, City, State, Application Hash


Apple (or anyone else) can, of course, calculate these hashes for common programs: everything in the App Store, the Creative Cloud, Tor Browser, cracking or reverse engineering tools, whatever.


This means that Apple knows when you’re at home. When you’re at work. What apps you open there, and how often. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend’s house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel on a trip to another city.


“Who cares?” I hear you asking.


Well, it’s not just Apple. This information doesn’t stay with them:


  1. These OCSP requests are transmitted unencrypted. Everyone who can see the network can see these, including your ISP and anyone who has tapped their cables.
  2. These requests go to a third-party CDN run by another company, Akamai.
  3. Since October of 2012, Apple is a partner in the US military intelligence community’s PRISM spying program, which grants the US federal police and military unfettered access to this data without a warrant, any time they ask for it. In the first half of 2019 they did this over 18,000 times, and another 17,500+ times in the second half of 2019.

This data amounts to a tremendous trove of data about your life and habits, and allows someone possessing all of it to identify your movement and activity patterns. For some people, this can even pose a physical danger to them.
[...]

https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/
Click to expand...

Louis Rossmann rant on it:


Guessing people will still want Macs since MS phones home too much...
 
I have to say.
MS works better if they phone home.
I've used a few apps like WPD and the PC crawls like a snail.
Enable all telemetry again and speed resumes.

MS telemetry is transparent and can be flushed and viewed as well.

I'm not an Apple fan either way.
Overpriced tech that gets rehashed every year from Steve Jobs.

Without Steve none of their flagships would exist today.
 
It's sucks, but it is the world we live in.
If you in the professional industry there is no time to toy around with 'open source'. It is painful and a waste of time.
 
|tera| said:
I have to say.
MS works better if they phone home.
I've used a few apps like WPD and the PC crawls like a snail.
Enable all telemetry again and speed resumes.

MS telemetry is transparent and can be flushed and viewed as well.

I'm not an Apple fan either way.
Overpriced tech that gets rehashed every year from Steve Jobs.

Without Steve none of their flagships would exist today.
Click to expand...
Most of my MS telemetry is off and working fine, think the biggest issue is that a lot of the "tools" for it go to the extreme and break things like indexing and updates, so certain required services just don't work. But that's just been my experience, I'm sure there are people who've figured out the right things to disable and still get good performance. Personally, I don't care that much about phoning home depending on the data phoned home and if it's properly encrypted so only MS can access it, and then how it's stored and what it's used for. If it's part of aggregate information, then it's not really going to do much but would help MS services a lot.

It's just rich that Apple is the one arguing about privacy and stuff, quite a hypocritical company, but that's to be expected. Would rather just want transparency instead.
 
smc said:
Just for clarity, so far as I am aware, macOS only "phones home" to run an app that was purchased from the app store, or was notarized via the Apple service, in order to validate the signing certificate. This isn't any kind of a secret - OCPS is discussed, e.g., here https://blog.ascertia.com/what-is-ocsp-and-how-does-it-work
Click to expand...
Just so we're clear, apps on e.g. the M1 can only be installed from the app store. So that would be every app will cause a check to happen.

And yes, not a secret, the issue is that one can no longer block it.

Pretty sure EU will open a case soon, since this goes against the GDPR.
 
Johnatan56 said:
Most of my MS telemetry is off and working fine, think the biggest issue is that a lot of the "tools" for it go to the extreme and break things like indexing and updates, so certain required services just don't work. But that's just been my experience, I'm sure there are people who've figured out the right things to disable and still get good performance. Personally, I don't care that much about phoning home depending on the data phoned home and if it's properly encrypted so only MS can access it, and then how it's stored and what it's used for. If it's part of aggregate information, then it's not really going to do much but would help MS services a lot.

It's just rich that Apple is the one arguing about privacy and stuff, quite a hypocritical company, but that's to be expected. Would rather just want transparency instead.
Click to expand...
I've disabled it on group policy and registry as well.
Same performance drop.

Even my laptop with a SSD crawls after using WPD to stop telemetry.

On point, I don't mind telemetry at any level, as long as its for basic information only.

If these guys log every action, keystroke and all internet usage stats, then I've got an issue with it.

These days apps on PC and mobile all request 'anonymous data collection'.
There's one reason why I never allow it.
There's enough processing of vital programs and apps. I don't need to add overhead. Especially not on a phone.
 
Johnatan56 said:
Just so we're clear, apps on e.g. the M1 can only be installed from the app store. So that would be every app will cause a check to happen.
Click to expand...
According to Techcrunch
Universal apps can be downloaded both from the App Store and the web, Apple noted.
Click to expand...
techcrunch.com

iOS apps can run on Apple's new Apple Silicon Macs | TechCrunch

Apple detailed today how its new Apple Silicon Macs would be capable of running a wider range of apps than before, even in the case where an iOS developer
techcrunch.com techcrunch.com
 
bwana said:
According to Techcrunch

techcrunch.com

iOS apps can run on Apple's new Apple Silicon Macs | TechCrunch

Apple detailed today how its new Apple Silicon Macs would be capable of running a wider range of apps than before, even in the case where an iOS developer
techcrunch.com techcrunch.com
Click to expand...
I can't find that web reference anywhere else, and the question there is if they just mean web apps.
AFAIK in order to take advantage of rosetta 2, you currently need to upload your app to the new unified app store.

But I'd love to be proven wrong, would make the ARM migration a lot more compelling, we'll see on the 17th.
 
RedViking said:
It's sucks, but it is the world we live in.
If you in the professional industry there is no time to toy around with 'open source'. It is painful and a waste of time.
Click to expand...
That is a hasty generalization. While I agree that a lot of the professional industries (since this isn't a catch-all term) doesn't want to run with open source alternatives due to years of over-reliance understandably, I don't agree with your phrasing that it's painful and a waste of time, as many industries involved in media, IT, sciences and freights etc. make use of and are heavily intertwined with open source backbones and frameworks precisely because of the headaches large and often unnecessary proprietary alternatives give people, and this continues to grow every year.
So, while an aspect like using a FOSS OS might definitely give headaches in certain scenarios, it definitely doesn't in others, just as professionally. I had to reply to this because I'm a little irked with the awful preconceived notion that the 'professional industry' had to bleed over and be accepted into the home just to make some feel better over the practises like this forced telemetry being established over time, nothing against you personally.
 
Every *nix distro logs this kind of stuff, just like I’m sure any Windows or other setup does too.

So I’m wondering if the uploading of said logs isn’t wrapped up in the “send analytics to Apple” or “send analytics to developer” opt in/out.

Will be interested to see what comes out of it in the coming days.

The “your computer isn’t yours” clickbait headline can **** right off though.
 
SauRoNZA said:
Every *nix distro logs this kind of stuff, just like I’m sure any Windows or other setup does too.

So I’m wondering if the uploading of said logs isn’t wrapped up in the “send analytics to Apple” or “send analytics to developer” opt in/out.

Will be interested to see what comes out of it in the coming days.

The “your computer isn’t yours” clickbait headline can **** right off though.
Click to expand...
What do you mean? None of the distros and BSDs I work with do this so that's emphatically false. Secondly, the article states that this has nothing to do with analytics of any sorts.
I think the headline is more than apt, not with the current Macs but with the Silicon ones. Not being able to finely control what your OS is doing, your OS deciding what's best for you, and now being next to near impossible to load whatever OS you want on your new machines clearly denotes a machine that doesn't belong to you.
 
upup said:
Let me tell you, with windows 10 it is nearly the same.
Click to expand...
That nearly is quite a big difference in this case. Again, the issue is not that it's being sent, but to whom it is being sent and how it is being and that you can't opt out of it being sent.
 
Reading this it seems like Rossman is maybe a bit too clickbaity for once.

thenextweb.com

Apple apps on Big Sur bypass firewalls and VPNs — this is terrible

Security researchers have found that Apple apps on Big Sur bypass firewalls and VPNs — this is a huge security and privacy issue.
thenextweb.com thenextweb.com

It appears to only apply to Mac Appstore apps and while we don't quite know the motivations yet, it's not necessarily nefarious.

It's certainly not the drama it's being made out to be.
 
Crumbl0x said:
What do you mean? None of the distros and BSDs I work with do this so that's emphatically false. Secondly, the article states that this has nothing to do with analytics of any sorts.
I think the headline is more than apt, not with the current Macs but with the Silicon ones. Not being able to finely control what your OS is doing, your OS deciding what's best for you, and now being next to near impossible to load whatever OS you want on your new machines clearly denotes a machine that doesn't belong to you.
Click to expand...

What I meant was that your kernel logs contain this information on just about any system. You can quickly track when what was launched or killed by which user with a perfect timeline etc.

The information is already there, it's just not being sent anywhere.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is specifically gathering data in preparation of the Apple Silicon Macs launching, that would actually make a whole lot of sense. It would explain the need for it to bypass VPN's and Firewalls somewhat.
 
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