Comment by ProllyInfamous
8 hours ago
Keep adding to your list, friend:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50071310#50078574> [Spotlight's "helpfulness," which cannot be disabled (viaGUI)]
Apple's OS is toxic, at this point.
My two newest Macs are entirely offline (air-gapped) and used primarily for LLM – maybe Apple's secret (all along) has been to get people like me to purchase twice as much hardware (as would be necessary in a privacy-respecting world)?
> which cannot be disabled (viaGUI)
Are you sure? I've just inspected my macOS 27.2 machine with my firewall and I couldn't find requests to smoot.apple.com while typing in spotlight(show related content and help improve apple search are both disabled).
I am certain only up to Sequoia; there is a new mini with Tahoe on it sitting here so let me replicate that behavior (if hostname isn't smoot., it'll be something). I've been meaning to update to GoldenGate (since buying it last week it has been used for just 2 hours, playing with LLMs on the default Tahoe); so I'll do this too and then see what the latest macOS's behavior is.
While I'm doing that, pull up your *.apple.com outreaches.
If you are not seeing <security.apple.com> on any Silicon's boot, you are not seeing full logs (all Silicon, and macs since T2, do this reach-out pre-post).
I still can't figure out how to set Sequoia's firewall to enable logging.
I've also spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to properly configure which DNS-server should be used, but while reading this thread I'm beginning to wonder: maybe the reason I'm having so much trouble understanding how to set this up properly could be that the OS is messing with me and my DNS-settings, and the lack of documentation describing how DNS-resolution is supposed to work on MacOS is really a feature meant to keep me from finding out that they are deliberately making it impossible to secure connectivity at a DNS-level?
Next thing you know, a similar explanation might pop up regarding configuration of the packetfilter. It has already been frustrating not being able to figure out these basics on my own for several years. It will be absolutely infuriating to find out this struggle has been pointless anyway, and it turns out they have been using mislabeling core components of their OS. The moment DNS-settings are not really settings the OS uses when doing DNS-lookups, I feel deliberately deceived.
It's like calling an OS Unix-based, and subsequently override standard Unix-rules seemingly at random and without consent of whoever is supposed to be the system's administrator, that people might start thinking the OS is merely intended as a tool to ruin any reputation of reliability that Unix may have once had. The great thing about a Mac is that it just works, they said. So far my experience has been the opposite. And whenever I get the illusion that something works as it is expected to work, I've learned to recognize it for what it is. An illusion. How is any of such behaviour even legally and ethically justified? How can they legally sell systems running MacOS to customers whose job includes working with classified information? How are such customers supposed to secure their system if it these 'features' are not properly documented?
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills! :(
Well fuck.
Just dug my old Xeon workstation out of the cupboard and am installing Debian on it.
My main desk has three Apple Silicons (two entirely airgapped, and am typing on third); sitting next to it is my beautiful 27" iMac (2009), with full Adobe CS4 (also offline); just purchased a pristine MacPro5,1 – seventeen year old computer! – for my main online Apple experience (using OS 10.14 from a decade ago), mostly because it cannot AI/LLM/Siri, even if it wanted to. Then I will have three offline Silicons.
Since the beginning of this year, I am now primarily running (online) a 9800X3D with a 5070Ti – Linux - which is only possible with LLM tutorials/help (mostly offline, on my own Silicon LLM).
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Happy restomodding!