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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

The problem is not that it’s $99/year. The problem is that it requires strong ID, and if you are doing it as a company (ie if you don’t want Apple to publicize your ID name to everyone who uses your app) then you have to go through an invasive company verification process that you can fail for opaque reasons unrelated to fraud or anything bad.

The system sucks. I’d love to be able to sign my legitimate apps with my legitimate company, but I don’t wish to put the name on my passport onto the screens of millions of people, and my company (around and operating for 20-ish years now) doesn’t pass the Apple verification for some reason.

I also can’t use auto-enroll (DEP) MDM for this reason.

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I think the lack of any human to talk to is the worst part of modern tech. Especially for business, where your income may depend on it. It's beyond cruel to prevent people from operating with no explanation of why and no way to find out how to fix it.

Well, what can I say except that the 80s, with their little independent app vendors shipping floppy disks in little baggies, are long behind us. Computers are now commonplace enough, with all the attendant dangers, that platform vendors are demanding a bit of accountability if you want to ship for their platforms, and unfortunately accountability means money and paperwork. The platform vendors are well within their rights to do so. They have a right to protect their reputations, and when malicious or buggy software appears on their platform, their reputation suffers. Half or more of the blue screens on Windows in the late 90s and early 2000s for instance, were due to buggy third-party drivers, yet Microsoft caught the blame for Windows crashing. It took a new driver model, standards on how drivers are expected to behave, and signed drivers to bring this under control.

The future is signed code with deep identity verification for every instruction that runs on a consumer device, from boot loader through to application code. Maybe web site JavaScript will be granted an exception (if it isn't JIT-compiled). This will be a good thing for most consumers. Until Nintendo cleaned out all the garbage and implemented strict controls on who may publish what on their console, the North American video game market was a ruin. The rest of computing is likely to follow suit, for similar reasons.

Congratulations on writing the most servile corporate apologia I've seen all week. This is a masterpiece of Stockholm syndrome.

"Accountability means money and paperwork." Beautiful. Just beautiful. You know what else means money and paperwork? A protection racket. "Nice app you got there, shame if something happened to it before it reached customers. That'll be 30% please." But sure, let's call extortion "accountability" because Tim Apple said so.

Your driver signing example is chef's kiss levels of missing the point. Microsoft said "hey, sign your drivers so we know they're not malware" they didn't say "only drivers we approve can run, and also we get a cut." You're comparing a bouncer checking IDs to a mafia don enforcing territory. These are not the same thing.

And oh my god, the Nintendo argument. You're seriously holding up Nintendo's lockout chip as consumer protection? The same lockout chip they used to squeeze third-party developers, control game production, and maintain an iron grip on pricing? "Until Nintendo cleaned out the garbage" yeah, they cleaned it out alright, straight into their own pockets. The video game crash was caused by publishers like Atari flooding the market with garbage like E.T., not by independent developers needing more "accountability."

"The future is signed code with deep identity verification for every instruction." Holy hell. You're not describing a security feature, you're describing a prison. You're literally fantasising about a world where every line of code needs corporate permission to execute. That's techno feudalism with RGB lighting.

This isn't about protecting anyone from bugs. It's about trillion-dollar companies convincing people like you that you need their permission to use the computer you bought. And somehow, SOMEHOW, you've decided this is good actually, and the 1980s with its freedom and innovation was the problem.

The fact that you think general-purpose computing is a "danger" that needs to be locked down says everything about how effectively these corporations have trained you to beg for your own chains.

> "The future is signed code with deep identity verification for every instruction." Holy hell. You're not describing a security feature, you're describing a prison. You're literally fantasising about a world where every line of code needs corporate permission to execute. That's techno feudalism with RGB lighting.

Yeah. It's gonna suck for us but the consumer market will eat it up. An Xbox that runs Excel. It's not a fantasy. What do you think the Windows 11 hardware requirements were all about? It's Microsoft's way of getting people to get rid of their old PCs without the necessary security hardware, so that when Windows 12 comes out the PC will be a fully locked down platform.

Again, consumers ate up the NES. They ate up the iPhone. This happened partially because of, not in spite of, the iron grip the vendor had over the platform, because they came with a guarantee (a golden seal even, in Nintendo's case!) that no bad stuff would slip through. It filtered out a lot of good stuff, too, but the market has shown that's a price it's willing to pay for some measure of assurance that the bad stuff will be stopped at the source. It's a business strategy that works in the broader market, even though it harms techies. Techies are a tiny, tiny minority, and it's time they learned their place in the grand scheme of things.

At least you can use your ID. If you want to get a code signing certificate for Microsoft at least in Switzerland all the CAs I tried using required me to be incorporated. I'm not sure how it is now but at least a few years ago I couldn't get a code signing certificate as an individual.

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