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macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years
Why does it take 2 years to realise that macOS has been checking signing certificate validity online?
Howard Oakley
Macs & painting – 🦉 No AI content
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Visit eclecticlight.co → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jun 2017 – May 2026
Systems & Performance 77Hardware & Electronics 23Security & Privacy 16Tools & Productivity 12Society, Policy & Culture 7Life, Learning & Writing 7
2
How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS
By segregating macOS background tasks on Efficiency cores, M1 Macs can run user apps unfettered on their Performance cores. And that feels really fast.
3
You can't trust macOS Privacy and Security settings
How to gain access to the contents of privacy-protected folders even though Privacy & Security settings say that access is denied.
4
Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief
If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn’t have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to th…
5
The Elephant at WWDC
Every developer should watch the 5 videos about DocC from WWDC. But it’s really a plaintive cry for help. Until Apple squares up and addresses the problem, it can only grow worse.
6
Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence
What was the key to successfully learning to drive, ride a bike, or speak a foreign language? Confidence, and it’s every bit as important in computing, and in macOS.
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macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format
ASIF disk images are new in Tahoe, and promise to be space efficient, as they’re sparse files, and almost as fast as the disk they’re stored on. Ideal for VMs and general use.
8
The Perils of M1 Ownership
The primary admin account on an M1 Mac is its Owner, responsible for authorising the installation and use of second operating systems. Here’s what can go wrong with Ownership.
9
M1 Macs have another hidden boot mode
Apple has revealed the hidden Fallback Recovery OS mode available on M1 Macs. How to enter and use it, and why it’s another big plus.
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APFS is not safe to use with names which have Unicode normalisation issues
APFS is not currently safe to use with names which might have Unicode normalisation issues – which means it is only safe with a limited ASCII character set.
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Users are losing out against Big Sur’s sealed System
macOS 11.2, 11.2.1 and 11.2.2 have come in quick succession. What do they tell us about how difficult it is to update Big Sur’s sealed System volume? Is this the way to go?
12
Why are Apple Silicon VMs so different?
Before Apple had even released its Developer Transition Kit, virtualisation was already one of the 3 pillars of software support on Apple silicon Macs.
13
The ‘app’ you can’t trash: how SIP is broken in High Sierra
When you can’t remove an app which you installed just a few minutes ago, you know there’s something wrong. Here’s the solution, and why this is bad security.
14
Apple has stopped providing standalone installers for macOS updates
Apple released macOS Big Sur 11.1 on 14 December. Although yesterday it finally posted standalone installers for the two concomitant security updates to Catalina and Mojave, no standalone updaters …
15
The Anatomy of a macOS App
How Mac applications evolved from a multitude of resources to a bundle formed from a standard layout of directories, and how they have come to be largely self-contained in macOS 26.
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How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?
Latest Geekbench performance figures for macOS VMs, and testing of how few cores and how little memory is really needed: could you run a macOS VM usefully on a MacBook Neo?
17
More Mac malware from Google search
Follow a sponsored result in Google to a page in Medium that provides a Terminal command that you will live to regret. And what is Marek’s disease?
18
M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2
It’s limited to 5 Gb/s, giving read rates of about 400 MB/s and writes at about 430 MB/s. Fine for Time Machine backups, but bad with NVMe drives.
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Networking changes coming in macOS 27
We are under warning that macOS 27 is likely to remove support for AFP, and lately some additional requirements for connection to certain servers. This explains how these could affect you.
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Why E cores make Apple silicon fast
Apple silicon architecture is designed to get background processes out of the way of our apps running in the foreground, by using the E cores.
21
PostScript’s sudden death in Sonoma
For the last 39 years, PostScript has been at the heart of the Mac, bringing desktop publishing, fonts, and the LaserWriter and other printers. It has been removed from Sonoma.
22
Can you slim macOS down?
In a quest to reduce the number of processes running in macOS Tahoe, consider the example of Time Machine backups, which can easily be replaced by 3rd party alternatives.
23
What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?
Is a process named triald stealing lots of CPU? Or maybe ~/Library/Trial is huge, or filling your backups? Maybe it’s all just one of Apple’s Experiments.
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How virtualisation came to Apple Silicon Macs
From Hypervisor APIs in OS X 10.10 Yosemite in 2014, through early VirtIO kernel extensions in Mojave in 2018, and Arm hypervisor support in Big Sur.
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macOS now scans for malware whenever it gets a chance
How macOS now has anti-malware scanners checking your Mac automatically many times each day for the most frequent malware.
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We need to document macOS
macOS is now largely undocumented. It’s time to do the job ourselves: what about an open collaborative project?
27
Is Apple checking images we view in the Finder?
Can it be true that Apple is sent information about every image we browse in the Finder? Analysis of Visual Look Up and Live Text and when it happens.
28
Console, the vital tool that Apple abandoned
Console is the epitome of Apple’s problem with tools and support for its users, and is exactly what it needs to fix.
29
How does macOS manage virtual cores on Apple Silicon?
Code run in a lightweight Virtual Machine can’t take advantage of the Efficiency cores of the host Apple silicon Mac. How then does Sonoma handle its threads?
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macOS updates for Apple Silicon Macs are larger than reported
Why some report macOS updates as being more than 1 GB smaller than the figures given here. Don’t believe the size given by softwareupdate.