I recently learned that `xattr -cr path/to/my.app` solves the “this App is damaged would you like to move it to the trash” you get when you copy an app from one Mac to another.

That might be the Windows-iest feature of OSX I've ever heard of.

It seems macOS is going downhill fast these days.

No, it’s just that they’re becoming more popular. When you become a popular desktop OS, governments and militaries want to start using it which comes with some strange requirements. It also means that you can’t rely on “obscurity” to provide any sort of security, where before you could overlook some things.

Can you cite any sources for your claim that these things are being implemented to satisfy government/military requirements?

DISA?

I don’t know why grand op is downvoted. DoD requirements literally require a timeout setting for screensavers to begin locking. This has caught systems which have a race condition where you can move your mouse quickly and gain desktop access before it locks.

The long term effects come from the required changes to the development security model to remain productive and profitable (took MSFT a few OOB hotfixes and service packs to fix that example above, look when gnome kde xscreensaver etc introduced that feature etc)

> This has caught systems which have a race condition where you can move your mouse quickly and gain desktop access before it locks.

I fail to see how this is a race condition rather than how a screensaver is supposed to work?

Because it’s not, that’s why I pointed to xscreensaver feature implementation. Lock time is separate from screensaver activation time which is separate from energy saving activation time.

What defines when a locking screen saver is “locked”? 10m? Or 10m1s? You are making assumptions and that is what DISA spells out. Which forces the OS design to change in subtle ways. Like xattrs on files as great grand op was alluding to.

Does that provide clarity into how development security models evolve over the lifetime of an application?

What would that mean?

It would appear to mean it's a hacky, over-technical solution to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place, as copying things from one computer to another should just work™. This is one place where macOS used to shine and seems to be increasingly falling behind in.

> The Gatekeeper behavior is specific to running things from Finder (not Terminal), and only if you downloaded it via a browser that sets the com.apple.quarantine xattr.

The article says the described problem isn't limited in this way:

> This is not just for files downloaded from the internet, nor is it only when you launch them via Finder, this is everything. So even if you write a one line shell script and run it in a terminal, you will get a delay!

If you read the comments of the article and do your own testing, you will find that reality appears to be more complicated than the article suggests. Users have shown using both timing and wireshark that the shell scripts do not appear to be triggering notarization checks.

Quinn The Eskimo at Apple's forums is a 10x support engineer, his posts have helped me fix dozens of problems.

Unless somebody took over his name he’s been at Apple for almost 25 years, and was already being interviewed as such 20 years ago (http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.16/16.06/Ju...)

His site (http://www.quinn.echidna.id.au/Quinn/WWW/) supports its claim “I'm not a great believer in web” :-)

It's interesting to see a time when Apple seemed to allow employees to have side projects…

He needs to be, because Apple Developer Technical Support is chronically understaffed.

This is the way things worked prior to Catalina but is no longer the case.