Hacker News Reader

Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

Hold on a minute -- MacOS phones home every single time you launch an application? As a non-user of MacOS, this strikes me as utterly bonkers. You'd have to place a massive level of trust in the developers of your OS to accept this. And furthermore, surely the constant attempts to phone home have a negative effect on the user experience when the computer's network connection is missing or slow!

Perhaps the fine article has mischaracterized this behavior?

View on HN

Yes, this happens and it does cause slowdowns[1]. It can take several seconds to check an application if you're on a very slow internet connection.

The same happens on Windows through SmartScreen, but you can easily turn that off[2] at least. As far as I know, you can't disable this on macOS.

[1]: https://sigpipe.macromates.com/2020/macos-catalina-slow-by-d... [2]: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/5593-turn-off-smartscree...

This is correct, it attempts to check for notarization each time it is launched. In the case where there is no network connection most apps have the notarization "stapled" to the app meaning it actually carries the successful notarization authorization attached to the binary. This may short circuit checking for notarization with Apple's servers but I don't know if that happens for sure.

> Hold on a minute -- MacOS phones home every single time you launch an application?

It's on first launch of an application, but not on subsequent launches of that application.

As a non-user of MacOS, this strikes me as utterly bonkers.

I assume you use Linux or anything other than Windows? Because the "SmartScreen"[1] feature in the newer versions of Windows does the same thing.

[1] A common trend in these times: the word "smart" really means "we think you are stupid"

You assume correctly. Although I do use Windows for my day job, my expectations for that OS are so low that I ascribed its performance shortcomings to incompetence. I'm not tremendously surprised to learn that self-sabotage was involved. Sometimes after I type my password at the Windows 10 lock screen, I'm treated to a 5 minute wait during which I get to speculate about what terrible decisions have got us to this point. I could cold-boot Arch on a ten-year-old netbook, use it to check the weather, and shut it back down in that amount of time.

As I understand it: If the application has been notarized before distribution, it should contain a signed “ticket” which allows the app to run immediately. If not, it will hit a server, but it caches the result on success, so it should not have to repeat the check.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com