Comment by jrochkind1

The OP literally says if you disallow connection or unplug the intenret it does fail open.

I think it's probably an unintended bug that this failure mode was fail-closed.

The costs of this unintended bug are going to be huge to Apple's reputation, as demonstrated in this whole HN thread, where many assuming what's going on is even WORSE than it really is.

(Personally I think having signed certs (with opt-in ability to run unsigned apps, as MacOS has) is fine. And fail-open OSCP revocation check is also fine-ish, although it would annoy me if it's making it slower to launch apps on the regular. The problem here is a bug, not one of design. But most of this thread is assuming Apple was doing something different than this. Of course, how often a company produces fairly catastrophic bugs is also on them).