They are checking for revoked certificates.

The URL mentioned in sibling comments suggests this has to do with certificate revocation (OCSP): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Online_Certificate_Status_Protocol" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Online_Certificate_Status_Prot...</a>I agree that breaking system availability when an OCSP server isn&#x27;t available is user-hostile and unnecessary.

It does go locally if you are not on wifi. I thought the issue was my slow internet so I turned off wifi and suddenly everything launched just fine.

Can apple not use security certificates to verify publishers ? why does it need to go to their servers ?

I&#x27;m sure if the SCP Foundation gets involved in filtering our applications, they have a very good reason, like keeping Zalgo out of our reality.

Ahh, thanks for the hint. It was a bad typo, but I can&#x27;t edit my post anymore.Edit:Just reached out to Dang with a request to correct my typo.

Note that it&#x27;s ocsp.apple.com, not oSCp.apple.com.

yeah, I had spotlight thrashing my disk too.  Odd.

&gt; macOS is my favorite OS, but the shit I put up with...Right there with ya.

Same. Panic attack. Thought the SSD was dying. I ran Disk Utility diagnostics and started coming up with plans to reformat and restore as a last resort.Apple folks in this thread, this was terrible

&gt; macOS is my favorite OS, but the shit I put up with...Idk, the several Linux distros I’ve used recently, and Windows, have a much longer list of “shit _I_ put up with”

&gt; macOS is my favorite OS, butAin&#x27;t that the truth with every OS. I use Windows for gaming, PopOS for work on my desktop and MacOS for work on my laptop. The amount of weird issues is about constant.

I never have problems with the new MacOS or iOS. The trick is to just wait for the X.1 update.

My music software became completely useless on catalina, and I was also running into issues with spotlight so I disabled it. I downgraded(painfully) to Mojave and my system is so much speedier. wish I could completely switch to linux.

If I do any simple math calculation in Spotlight it pegs all cores at 100%. Its easily reproducible and really annoying because I&#x27;ve used spotlight as a calculator for years.

Just wait until you can only run signed binaries.As developers and engineers, we ought to be jumping off this platform like a sinking ship. It&#x27;s clear that they want to lock it down like the iPhone. Why else would they be measuring which apps are in use if they didn&#x27;t want to control it?If your argument is &quot;compatibility research&quot;, you&#x27;re missing the other warning signs.

I started panicking mildly thinking my drive was failing or something.And just before this, I finally managed to fix Spotlight pegging one core at 100% constantly. Next thing, I reboot into a laggy system. macOS is my favorite OS, but the shit I put up with... it&#x27;s basically an abusive relationship at this point.

I thought this was an old issue that was known or resolved months ago. Is this still an ongoing security practice that kills devs on MacOS?This is about when I remember seeing it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@acecilia&#x2F;apple-is-sending-a-request-to-their-servers-for-every-piece-of-software-you-run-on-your-mac-b0bb509eee65" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@acecilia&#x2F;apple-is-sending-a-request-to-t...</a>

You can&#x27;t go wrong with a ThinkPad. I switched from Mac to a T480 with Arch for dev work and it&#x27;s been great.

Found another reason for me to not get a Mac

My policy is to never upgrade anything until everyone I know has upgraded to the next version and not downgraded after N weeks.

Depends on how old, I guess. I&#x27;m running Mojave, and ran into the problem.

Huh apparently I win by still being on an old OS version?

Right around this same time, I had 1 macBook hard reboot (watchdogd timeout) and shortly thereafter, a second macBook froze, fan maxed out, with the display not coming up. Then it rebooted into recovery mode.Yeah, these _could_ be unrelated issues to what has been going on in Apple land today, but it&#x27;s uncanny...

`&#x2F;usr&#x2F;libexec&#x2F;trustd` exists on Mojave, too. There&#x27;s a (very unhelpful) manpage.I think you were just lucky to not open non-Apple applications during the outage.

Checking for notarization on each launch was introduced in catalina. Older versions have trustd, but it was only used for the gatekeeper checks added in 10.8.

I ran into this on trying to load a new video file on VLC, with Mojave, so I guess it&#x27;s not just apps, but maybe any new file load.

My 2018 MPB on Mojave had some serious issues launching apps for a little while yesterday (3PM central) afternoon. It seemed to resolve within an hour though. Not sure how that lines up with the outage described here.

I keep reading in the tweets how all Macs are unusable. Is this an OS bug that doesn&#x27;t effect older OSes? I&#x27;m on Mojave on my 2017 MBP, and have had zero issues at all.When was `trustd` introduced?

I discovered this by running unbound – a DNS server – locally (block some unwanted hosts and do dns over TLS). I guess the rest of the story is pretty obvious; having your default dns server not being able to resolve because you&#x27;re trying to verify it – since you cannot resolve your verify hostname – is obviously Not Great. As you can imagine, there is no waiting in the world that fixes this. I couldn&#x27;t kill (-9) the process either; had to reboot into safe mode, rename the binary and switch the default dns on the network.

2012 Macbook Pro.  Get the highest-spec Magsafe laptop you can find.

Are there no other suggestions beyond the 2012 MBP?I use arch linux on a Lenova Thinkpad T580, and I&#x27;m really happy with it, but I&#x27;m not sure about the colour accuracy of the screen. I doubt it&#x27;s as good as you find on an Apple.I, for one, am really interested in good, high quality alternative to apple laptop hardware, that meet the parent&#x27;s criteria.

My partner bought a razer 13 inch to replace a MacBook Air. It wasn’t cheap, the build quality is excellent and it handles everything (she’s in an orchestra and records her parts on it, does graphic design and sometimes plays fortnite.). The screen is quite nice and the build quality is better than my system 76 (onyx pro) which I really like too.Dave2d on YouTube gives pretty short and decent laptop reviews. I think he has a discord channel discussing the machines too

Yeah so basically in the windows world, a lot of the good laptops are under the &quot;business class&quot; of the various manufacturers:Dell Precision, HP Elite Book, MSI PrestigeIn the consumer world the Dell XPS, Asus Zenbook, Asus Pro Art are the way to go for a designer.Dell Precision is probably the overall best laptop. MSI Prestige is targetted right at you though, with color accuracy and a good display. The only brand I can personally vouch for is Dell. I and my partner use XPS&#x27;s, and a good friend of mine has a super nice Precision that I am jealous of (specifically the ports! I&#x27;m so over USB-C)

Try metabox. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.metabox.com.au&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.metabox.com.au&#x2F;</a>). They have a wide range of laptops at various specs and prices and form factors and whatever else. A lot of the guys at work have started to switch to them and they feel nice to hold and fondle.I&#x27;m currently in the same boat as you and my next machine will be from these guys when my (admittedly very new) Macbook Pro gives up or gets taken over by Apple.

&gt; keyboard + trackpad alignment is wonky (it&#x27;s off-center in a lot of cases! How weird is that???)Those are laptops with numeric keypads, the trackpad is still centred relative to the &quot;main area&quot; of the keyboard (the home row and in particular the rest keys - the two keys with a little bump, F and J on a QWERTY) but it is off-centre relative to the body of the laptop due to the presence of the keypad.Macs don&#x27;t have numpads so if you&#x27;ve always used Macs it&#x27;s understandable that you&#x27;re not familiar with this type of layout.In any case that type of placement makes no difference while you are using the laptop, because keys and touchpad are still where they are supposed to be relative to each other.

Their SSL certificate revocation server (the default for macOS) goes down an you try to tie it to Apple Silicon being created to lock-in users? I understand the feelings people have about this but today&#x27;s failure seems orthogonal.

&gt; they can simply toggle a switch for all users to &quot;no unsigned binaries&quot;That switch was toggled with Big Sur and Apple silicon: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mjtsai.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;19&#x2F;apple-silicon-macs-to-require-signed-code&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mjtsai.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;19&#x2F;apple-silicon-macs-to-req...</a>

Thinkpads. Lenovo is far from perfect, but they have been good stewards of the brand.

Manjaro GNOME on any of the Thinkpad models.I switched away from Macbook Pro about a year ago, after using Apple hardware for about a decade.It&#x27;s working great, GNOME interface is solid and productive, Manjaro and AUR libraries just work. Highly recommend making the move, sooner the better as I&#x27;m sure you see the writing on the wall.

I agree with you that Apple is doing way too much to restrict users. But I also agree with Craig in that I don&#x27;t see how Apple silicon is useful for them in helping to restrict users.

X1 Yoga 4 is what I went with recently when my 2016 macbook pro died for the 4th time since owning it.Its very similar to the x1 carbon but converts to a tablet and it has an aluminum body.I can&#x27;t say I&#x27;m out of the apple ecosystem entirely, but I decided to spend my money elsewhere given the abysmal quality of the macbook pro line these days.

Get a Thinkpad, P-series, lots of options. Run Fedora on it. Great machines, great keyboard, 4k screens, good color, goot battery life, lightweight. Everything works. Mac-level price, and worth it.

I think you should stick to Apple, frankly. Every time Apple comes up with something new (or just a new software release), people come out of their sheds to warn about all the bad things that will happen.And then almost none of those bad things happen. I&#x27;ve witnessed this dozens of times now, so a safe interpretation would be to assume that this time none of those things happen.

I’d suggest using a Mac until it doesn’t actually work. Then you can find a new computer to compromise with.

My ASUS Zenbook has been solid ! But the macs are definitely prettier.

&gt; I&#x27;m trying to find a laptop with good build quality, long battery life, a good display that I can design on, a good trackpadSounds like you might want a Microsoft surface (or surface book).Not sure about the TouchPad - but at least there&#x27;s a pen for drawing on the screen.

My Huawei Matebook Pro has been everything I wanted in a Mac, in a way I couldn&#x27;t get from Apple.Pros that Macbooks don&#x27;t have: USB-A (along with USB-C), no touch bar, 3:2 screen, can enable secure boot if I choose so feel like I&#x27;ll be able to run whatever I want on it, replaceable SSD, etc.Pros that Macbooks also have: still has a great build quality, full day batteryCons that both have: Non replaceable RAM

NotebookCheck is a great website for laptop reviews. They even get into the nitty-gritty details of display calibration, input devices, power consumption, etc.Here&#x27;s a list of the laptops with the best displays: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notebookcheck.net&#x2F;The-Best-Notebooks-with-the-Best-Displays.120541.0.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notebookcheck.net&#x2F;The-Best-Notebooks-with-the-Be...</a>And here&#x27;s a list of general multimedia laptops that would be roughly equivalent to a MacBook Pro: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notebookcheck.net&#x2F;Notebookcheck-s-Top-10-Multimedia-Laptops.98608.0.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notebookcheck.net&#x2F;Notebookcheck-s-Top-10-Multime...</a>

Re colour accuracy, checkout thinkpads, they even come with a colour calibration sensor so you can have them autocalibrate daily&#x2F;weekly or whatever suits you.

&gt; edit - It&#x27;s also really hard as a designer + developer + would-be researcher in the making to find a good computer.I woukld agree on desginer.Absolutely not on developer or researcher.Actually MacOS is for the reasons you mentioned incredibly developer-unfriendly (unless you target is of course the iOS ecosystem).And for research there is no better platform but Linux. Unless you are in clicky-colorful frontend applications where I would doubt you are doing serious research.

Wow so many words to just say “this product isn’t for me”

The only tool in that video you linked to is that dishonest cheerleader Gruber.

Dell XPS have an option for a fantastic 4K screen. After calibration it&#x27;s better than the Retina screen on my 2013 MBP.

It&#x27;s hard to say who is now Apple&#x27;s target audience. It seems like their products are ideal for people who don&#x27;t know much about IT and just want to watch a video or edit their holiday photos and maybe create a CV and will probably never go beyond that. Other people still enjoy Macs from 2012, but things are moving on when you look at desktop PC and what you can do. Apple looks more and more dumbed down.

&gt; their keyboard + trackpad alignment is wonky (it&#x27;s off-center in a lot of cases! How weird is that???)Buy something without a number pad. Unfortunately most 15&quot; laptops do have one.If anybody from HP is reading this, I&#x27;ll pay an extra for a keyboard without number pad on your 15&quot; ZBooks with 3 buttons on the touchpad. Space bar and touchpad aligned with the center of the screen please.

Wow, the way Craig is laughing at the question and so dismissive of it is really insulting.  Maybe it&#x27;s the more casual nature of the interview&#x2F;discussion, but this really is the crappy icing on the cake of Mac users&#x27; continuously-declining control over the machines they spend their hard-earned money on.  &quot;Where do you even begin to come up with that theory&quot;??  I mean, maybe we&#x27;re seeing the gradual hampering of control over our computer with every OS X release in the past 5-10 years?

Huawei Matebook X Pro.
A friend has one, 2019 model. Runs Ubuntu on it.Trackpad is as good as it gets outside Apple, I&#x27;d say.The display looks gorgeous. 
Can&#x27;t say about color accuracy&#x2F;fidelity though.

&gt; Oh and it shouldn&#x27;t be more expensive than a Mac as many of these laptops are!Clearly there&#x27;s no need to jump ship if it&#x27;s more expensive on the other side.

Assuming you were going for a Macbook Pro &quot;15 for 2399$Recommendations for linux laptops (or checkout <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linuxpreloaded.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linuxpreloaded.com&#x2F;</a> ):* Tuxedo <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tuxedocomputers.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tuxedocomputers.com</a>~1000$ 1.5kg, Their &quot;15, 1080p flagship is configurable with AMD Ryzen 7 4700U, 32GB RAM, 500GB M.2They also have more expensive versions with 4k OLED displays if that&#x27;s what you&#x27;re into.
Also &quot;13.* KDE Slimbook <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slimbook.es&#x2F;en&#x2F;store&#x2F;slimbook-kde&#x2F;kde-slimbook-15-comprar" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slimbook.es&#x2F;en&#x2F;store&#x2F;slimbook-kde&#x2F;kde-slimbook-15-co...</a>~1200$ 1.5kg, &quot;15, 1080p, AMD Ryzen 4800 H, 32GB RAM, 500GB NVMe* System76 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;system76.com&#x2F;laptops&#x2F;gaze15&#x2F;configure" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;system76.com&#x2F;laptops&#x2F;gaze15&#x2F;configure</a>~1350$ 2.2kg, 15&quot;, 1080p, i7-10750H, 32GB DDR4, 500GB NVMe* Purism <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shop.puri.sm&#x2F;shop&#x2F;librem-15" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shop.puri.sm&#x2F;shop&#x2F;librem-15</a>They&#x27;re trying to become and opensource Apple --&gt; high prices, own linux distro, trying to make their own ecosystem, etc.~2000$ 1.8kg, &quot;15, 4K, Core i7 7500U (Kabylake), 32GB RAM, 500GB NVMe

&gt;Apple can now make their machine reject a new, third-party repair part like a bad transplant. Should they choose to.It seems the iPhone 12 is already rejecting non-original parts, even if the part comes from another iPhone 12: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24924761" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24924761</a>

Get a Thinkpad. I replaced a 2015 MacBook Pro with a Thinkpad P1 Gen2 and love it. The trackpad isn’t as nice. The keyboard is better. Running WSL2 you have a great Unixy development environment in Windows. Or just install Linux. As thin and light as a MacBook Pro. Much better thermals, though still not awesome. Other, somewhat larger Thinkpads have better thermals. You can upgrade your RAM, add 2 SSDs and other peripherals like a 4G card etc if you like. Thinkpads come with fantastic service. Next business day on-site repair including for accidental damage and they mean it. Looks: It’s the design Apple copied for their very first laptops and is IMO better looking. They got it right the first time and haven’t changed it materially. Built like a tank. Not quite a tough book but they will take some abuse.

I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s a one-sized-fits-all solution without something custom and extremely expensive ($15k+). Maybe a Lenovo T480 for most purposes and a dedicated second screen for color correctness? I had a  Dell Studio XPS 1645 with an RGBLED screen with an insane gamut. It begs the question: Why aren&#x27;t such screens widely available?

&gt;it&#x27;s off-center in a lot of cases! How weird is thatIt is off center if they have a number pad to the right of the normal keyboard layout. At first glance it looks weird, but it is 100% what you would want if you were using the laptop. Otherwise the trackpad would end up being right over where your right wrist is.

I just gotta say that I don’t think it’s clear where they are going. You are of course free to do however you like. And if you are leaving because of what they already have done, that’s reasonable, but if you are leaving because of what you are guessing that they might do tomorrow, is that really wise? I mean even with the ARM switch won’t it be as easy to switch to win&#x2F;linux intel after a year if you are not satisfied?I don’t like the boot thing either, and it’s a bit scary not being on intel as everyone else is right now, but I also think ARM feels really interesting and it might turn out to be a great new platform!Edit: i mean it is not like they never listen, they did take bake the mac pro, they did fix the keyboards, you have cli tools to make a lot of changes in how macos works, etc. Of course I would like hundreds of things to be different, but I believe that is true of all platforms.

You can disable this behaviour by listing terminal under Dev tools, and launching from there.

I came across this sometimes ago, I don&#x27;t have any personal experience with their laptops but they seems promising.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;starlabs.systems&#x2F;pages&#x2F;laptops" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;starlabs.systems&#x2F;pages&#x2F;laptops</a>

The Dell XPS line is my recommendation. But it’s not that much cheaper than the Mac equivalents

Do you _really_ need a laptop? That&#x27;s my solution to the problem of no good Linux laptops. I&#x27;ve got a desktop at home now, and when I go back to the office, I&#x27;ll pick up a mini desktop. I&#x27;ll keep an old MacBook in a drawer if I need to take it into a meeting. When I used laptops only, they were just plugged into a monitor&#x2F;keyboard&#x2F;mouse at all times anyway.

I really like my surface book. They are priced like MacBook pros (and spec&#x27;d like them too). The track pad is great, the pen input and detachable screen come in handy more than I&#x27;d have guessed when I first switched.Apple has a pretty broad utility patent around their trackpads, which requires other manufacturers to work around what would seem like pretty obvious things.PDF: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.sbnation.com&#x2F;assets&#x2F;2017767&#x2F;USD674382S1.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.sbnation.com&#x2F;assets&#x2F;2017767&#x2F;USD674382S1.pdf</a>

Over the generations, I have had three Macbooks, four Vaios, a ThinkPad, a HP, multiple ASUS and Huawei. Most of the devices I have killed by travel: dust infiltration, vibrated the BGA chips off the boards by motorbike vibrations..My requirements have all been fulfilled with the Huawei MateBook X Pro.You could say it&#x27;s heavily inspired by the MacBook. Aluminum case. Chiclet keyboard with decent travel. 2000x3000 display (2:3 ratio!). Awesome trackpad. Good battery life. Portable. Solid. 2x USB-C and 1x USB-A. Sustained multiple drops.For context, I am able to pull solid 12-hour days on the device, without a mouse, without fatigue or frustration.Cheaper than a MacBook. Might be worth a look.

Owning a Lenovo X1 Carbon 7th gen, 2019, 4K screen, 16GB RAM. extremely impressed with the hardware, running Linux Mint and going to move to Manjaro. 
Initially i tried PopOS! but they removed from Gnome the intermediate scaling (1.5X) of the UI, just like in MacOS you have Display - Scaled options. 
I really like the per monitor setting which you don&#x27;t have in Linux. (or i didn&#x27;t research enough); e.g. More space on main display (external 4k monitor) and Larger Text on the macbook screen.
I&#x27;m also jumping ship due to the worst experience i had in 25 years dealing with technology, 1 month to replace a swollen battery with a 3rd party repair service. Apple throws now all this &quot;complex&quot; hardware issues to 3rd parties since their employees are pressuring them not to execute hazardous repairs in their own &quot;centers&quot;

So yesterday I wrote about the blurring lines of ownership, and people came back with some fairly disparate responses. It&#x27;s fair to say that I was mostly dismissed. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25058952" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25058952</a>And this is why I won&#x27;t be moving to Apple silicon. Apple already has the ability to restrict whats apps I can run (they can simply toggle a switch for all users to &quot;no unsigned binaries&quot;), and congrats! Apple is the sole decider of what we get to use on our computers.Of course Apple&#x27;s Craig Federighi assures us that the people making such assertions are &quot;tools&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Hg9F1Qjv3iU?t=3177" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Hg9F1Qjv3iU?t=3177</a> , timestamp 53:33) and they have no intention whatsoever of taking away our ability to do general compute on the machines we buy and own.Except...Apple can already decide what binaries you can execute. Should they choose to.Apple is now restricting what other OSes you can boot into. As they&#x27;ve chosen to.Apple can now make their machine reject a new, third-party repair part like a bad transplant. Should they choose to.It&#x27;s clear where they&#x27;re going. And I&#x27;m jumping ship. It&#x27;s painful to do so, given how invested I am in the ecosystem, but we&#x27;re already beyond the threshold that many of us would have left earlier in the decade.---edit - It&#x27;s also really hard as a designer + developer + would-be researcher in the making to find a good computer. Most non-Apple laptops don&#x27;t have very good color accuracy. They also don&#x27;t have good trackpads, and their keyboard + trackpad alignment is wonky (it&#x27;s off-center in a lot of cases! How weird is that???)I&#x27;m trying to find a laptop with good build quality, long battery life, a good display that I can design on, a good trackpad so that I don&#x27;t have to carry around a mouse, good speakers would be a plus, and light enough that I don&#x27;t feel like I&#x27;m lifting weights while working on my laptop. And this package should ideally come with 512GB of SSD storage and, at least, 16GB to 32GB of RAM.Oh and it shouldn&#x27;t be more expensive than a Mac as many of these laptops are!Any suggestions?

See also: all electric vehicles (except a few very old designs).

Pretty sure Apple is doing this for security reasons, not data gathering reasons.

&gt; I am currently unable to work because macOS sends hashes of every opened executable to some server of theirs and when `trustd` and `syspolicyd` are unable to do so, the entire operating system grinds to a halt.That&#x27;s another case of a product not doing its primary function - OS running apps - because company placed their own (data gathering) objective above it. See thermostats not turning on heat when the internet connection is down and other equally stupid examples...

and people was shocked at Windows 10 doing telemetry. MacOS isn&#x27;t doing it better as I see

Ha! So that&#x27;s what it was. Last night (I just woke up in the UK) my macbook pro started to crawl, I started to threat that it might be the SSD starting to fail.

or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nextdns.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nextdns.io&#x2F;</a>

Using a premium DNS with filtering features make sense: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dnsadblock.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dnsadblock.com</a>

There is a mistake here. It should be “ocsp.apple.com”

It probably just gets a fingerprint, or the cert’ information.But when the endpoint is dying and it gets called every time you try to run any binary…

That oscp server must be compiling a huge set of stats on application usage. That doesn&#x27;t sound right, privacy-wise.

Welp, I won&#x27;t be updating today then, not unless they fix that.

Here&#x27;s an idea: log all opened binaries somewhere and then every hour or so check them against the list.Never block me from opening something, but warn me about bad stuff on a regular basis.

Here&#x27;s a wild idea: don&#x27;t block executables from running.Or if you do, only do it for a set of known bad ones, as antivirus products do.Do not put a cloud service (or anything for that matter) between the users and their ability to run what they want.

The server is called OSCP which suggests to me that if we look at Apple in the most positive light - they sign and certify binaries as safe. If an app gets later reported as malicious, they need to revoke the certificate that has been used to sign said binary.So when you open an app, how else are they going to check whether the certificate is still valid or whether it has been revoked?Can anyone confirm whether this lookup applies to unsigned as well as signed binaries? As far as I know if I build a brand new binary with cargo, and run it, it doesn&#x27;t do any checks.

Why isn&#x27;t apple doing OCSP stapling &amp; caching?  Reverse proxies have long since solved OCSP availability with stapling and caching.

Will they prevent changing hosts file as well?

Currently the workaround seems to be &#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts override or firewall-level blocking.Just a small reminder that this can soon stop working: Apple&#x27;s apps bypass firewalls like LittleSnitch and LuLu on macOS Big Sur - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24838816" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24838816</a>

This might be a stupid question, but is there a downside to blocking this &quot;feature&quot;? I can&#x27;t think of any.I&#x27;ve been using Big Sur beta for some time and one of the things that annoyed me a bit was the sudden lack of responsiveness, which is a tad annoying given that I upgraded to a 16inch MBP earlier this year and everything felt so snappy.

OCSP not OSCPYou can also run these commands to disable ocsp (and crl) since it can no longer be accomplished in Keychain Access → Preferences:<pre><code> defaults write &#x2F;Library&#x2F;Preferences&#x2F;com.apple.security.revocation.plist CRLStyle None
 defaults write &#x2F;Library&#x2F;Preferences&#x2F;com.apple.security.revocation.plist OCSPStyle None
 defaults write com.apple.security.revocation.plist CRLStyle None
 defaults write com.apple.security.revocation.plist OCSPStyle None</code></pre>

I had both my personal and work laptop become unresponsive at the same time. I was wondering what kind of problem could cause that - was thinking EM interference or possibly something on my network. This explains it.

Can you not just add an IPv6 entry for it in your hosts file, e.g., ::1? That would work in Linux and seems like a much less nuclear option than disabling ipv6 all together, but admittedly I&#x27;ve never worked with ipv6 networking on Macs.Last time I played with a Mac they also had the BSD `ipfw` command for kernel packet filtering [1]. Could try something there if it still exists.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unix.com&#x2F;man-page&#x2F;FreeBSD&#x2F;8&#x2F;ipfw&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unix.com&#x2F;man-page&#x2F;FreeBSD&#x2F;8&#x2F;ipfw&#x2F;</a>

ocsp.apple.com also has an IPv6 address. Firefox connects to it even with 0.0.0.0 in the hosts file and a flushed cache (you need to also clear firefox&#x27;s internal cache if you&#x27;re testing with it), so I&#x27;d assume that trustd could connect to the ocsp site as well. I don&#x27;t think this will work without ensuring there is no IPv6 traffic on your network, or otherwise dumping both IPv4 and v6 packets to ocsp.apple.com.Disable IPv6:
sudo networksetup -setv6off Wi-Fi
(where Wi-Fi is the name of the network service)

Unbelievable. When I read the tweet (tried to post here as well), I suddenly realized why my Mac was unresponsive an hour ago.Here is another tweet that describes the problem in more detail:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;llanga&#x2F;status&#x2F;1326989724704268289" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;llanga&#x2F;status&#x2F;1326989724704268289</a>&gt; I am currently unable to work because macOS sends hashes of every opened executable to some server of theirs and when `trustd` and `syspolicyd` are unable to do so, the entire operating system grinds to a halt.EDIT:As others pointed out, I put this to my `&#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts` file and refreshed it like so:<pre><code> sudo emacs &#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts # add `0.0.0.0 ocsp.apple.com` 
 sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder # refresh hosts</code></pre>

Apparently you can set ocsp.apple.com to 127.0.0.1 in your &#x2F;etc&#x2F;hostsThis is really terrible, but at least the workaround is simple.

Thank you, this fixed it for me. (What a mess!)

Add the `127.0.0.1 ocsp.apple.com` line to your &#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts file.

I&#x27;m laughing so hard at this right now.And people somehow still love their macs...

This was my intuition!I was in the middle of a call to fix a problem with a customer, I need to near-panic telling them MY computer was frozen.Thanks Apple!

Turn off your internet, open the app, turn it back on.

I use and love Linux, but come on man, that kind of statement does not help. Even with proton and friends, wine is not perfect. There will most likely be problems, and it&#x27;s not a one to one transition. However, in my opinion, it is worth it, but there&#x27;s no sense pretending there is no cost.

Given that they&#x27;re using a MacBook they probably aren&#x27;t using very much Windows specific software if any, so I don&#x27;t know that Wine would be much of a factor.

It&#x27;d be cooler if they were called &quot;system32&quot;. JK

System76 is pretty great and they have amazing customer support. Plus between ProtonDB &#x2F; Lutris you can run pretty much anything you want that needed Windows before.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;system76.com&#x2F;laptops" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;system76.com&#x2F;laptops</a>

My MacBook is basically unusable right now. This appears to be the reason. Is there any way to fix it without installing little snitch?Edit: working as usual now, moments after i wrote this. But seriously Apple, how can you allow this to happen? Your services hanging should _never_ prevent my device from running things locally. This is seriously making me reconsider my next computer purchase.

Talking about a cluster.Now when I get my new mac, I&#x27;m going to find a way to opt out of this.

I don&#x27;t know if the slow downloads of Big Sur are related, but the underlying problem is that ocsp.apple.com[1] is fubar, and certificate revocation lookups are failing.EDIT: This might indeed be Big Sur-release-day related. Most certificate revocation failures are &quot;soft&quot;, but with ocsp.apple.com black-holed in &#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts I can&#x27;t resume downloading the update.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;lapcatsoftware&#x2F;status&#x2F;1326990296412991489" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;lapcatsoftware&#x2F;status&#x2F;132699029641299148...</a>

I successfully downloaded all 12GB of the update; however I am getting an Installation Failed error, which is apparently common and likely related: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;zollotech&#x2F;status&#x2F;1326994718744571914" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;zollotech&#x2F;status&#x2F;1326994718744571914</a>

Not only Macs. “There is a high chance that something will be wrong with it” applies to almost all software of the size of modern OSes.

This applies to every Mac, with or without an update.

This.To save yourself the headaches and frustrations, wait for the bug fix releases and updates to come first before installing this very first new release.It makes no sense to immediately update the system and then risk your computer being rendered unusable with such bugs and problems whilst having a deadline hanging over your head.

I’ve been running it as a daily driver since the first day of the developer betas and have found it to be vastly more stable than the previous version, with basically no issues before this.I don’t know what to tell you, beyond the fact that all use cases are not the same, apparently.

I ran the beta over the summer and it was awful. I loved the changes but it was just unstable as hell. And people kept saying it was the most stable is yet, I don’t get it.

&gt; Wait for at least one week and check out other people&#x27;s experiences first.Of course if everyone does this, there is no experience upon which to draw.Furthermore, the title is straight up wrong: this is not related to Big Sur and is in fact also affecting other versions with Gatekeeper.

The software quality of Apple is embarrassing. They have the money to hire the best of the best, and to do tons of manual QA yet their OS releases are always riddled with errors. Why is software the red-headed step-child of Apple?

This has nothing to do with a software update. I haven&#x27;t updated anything and am still running into this. It&#x27;s their online services that are the problem.

To elaborate on what others are saying, macOS has been doing this phone home for a while, it just looks like the server it phones home to started being _really slow_. So if you were offline, the software behaves fine, but if you&#x27;re online, it blocks on getting a response.Great example of how you should never block UX on network requests.

This was a problem on previous releases too.

It&#x27;s same for any other OS. There&#x27;s a reason Ubuntu won&#x27;t try to update itself to the next LTS until it hits X.1.

This has nothing to do with the problem we&#x27;re discussing.

You should never, ever, install a MacOS update the moment it comes out. There is a high chance (&gt; 30% from my experience) that something will be wrong with it. iOS too for that matter.Wait for at least one week and check out other people&#x27;s experiences first.

Would anyone be able to explain more specifically how cs_enforcement_disable is is different from disabling Gatekeeper?

Thanks, you can also disable library code signing validation too:`sudo defaults write &#x2F;Library&#x2F;Preferences&#x2F;com.apple.security.libraryvalidation.plist DisableLibraryValidation -bool true`

You can also disable code signing enforcement and amfi by adding the following boot args:cs_enforcement_disable=1 amfi_get_out_of_my_way=1

Install another OS? *There are some work around in this thread but in reality you don&#x27;t know how and when Apple may choose to automatically re-enable it without your consent.* You should probably just smack you Mac with a rock just to be sure ;)

Does anybody now how to disable all hashing on macOS? The best I could do was disable GateKeeper with `sudo spctl --master-disable`.

Indeed, I was bouncing a session in Logic and even that crawled, activity monitor showed a blank screen when it finally opened and iterm2 was unresponsive. I thought the machine was under load but the fans weren&#x27;t even on.

The title is slightly misleading. ALL macs with a recent macOS (Catalina?) are freezing, since the security checks that happens when you launch a binary is down. Even if you don&#x27;t update to Big Sur.

Hilarious. I wonder if any of the downvoters of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25068229" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25068229</a> now experience cognitive dissonance.

The tracking is not new, from Reddit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;netsec&#x2F;comments&#x2F;gp52pe&#x2F;apple_is_tracking_hashes_of_all_executables&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;netsec&#x2F;comments&#x2F;gp52pe&#x2F;apple_is_tra...</a>

Microsoft Windows also uploads your private exe’s, and then runs them on Microsoft servers:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;sensorfu&#x2F;how-my-application-ran-away-and-called-home-from-redmond-de7af081100d" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;sensorfu&#x2F;how-my-application-ran-away-and-...</a>

That&#x27;s correct. AFAIK Catalina will check online for everything, even binaries you compile yourself.

Oh man, imagining a DDOS to fail that over.Imagine how many people would lost their productiveness, maybe not at the big corps or govt (I assume they use a version of mac that call somewhere else&#x2F;don&#x27;t). But very very many people.

Almost certainly so. Apple has built chains of certificate trust very deep into the OS, along with apparently an assumption that this particular revocation service check is reliable &amp; fast enough to call out to the network a lot.

My understanding is that if you&#x27;re offline, it skips this check and everything works fine. The reason this is a big deal is that the problem&#x27;s on their end, so you&#x27;re not offline, so it keeps trying and waiting instead of just letting you skip the check.

On iOS, after a period of disconnection &quot;the phone won&#x27;t let you turn it on again until it goes online&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;BW32yUEymvU?t=1212" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;BW32yUEymvU?t=1212</a>

If you don&#x27;t have a connection, it just doesn&#x27;t do the check.  If you have a crappy connection like many of our students, it takes forever to check.  If the server is down, life just sucks and non-Apple programs don&#x27;t open.

That&#x27;s why notarized applications should be stapled too. The stapling &quot;ticket&quot; is embedded in the app bundle and allows macOS to perform an offline check.Basically you&#x27;ll get the usual GateKeeper window, but with a slightly different message, along the lines of &quot;I can&#x27;t check this binary in realtime but I trust the embedded notarization&quot;.

If you are connected to a network without an Internet connection, it just becomes unusable. Internet connection is somewhat unreliable in my area, and I had an internet outage that lasted for days during the COVID lockdown. I feared it was a malware infection causing the slow down. I switched over to Linux not long after.

With Android is the same. I have an App Firewall on my Android phone and since then the standard Android gallery app does not work really anymore. A lot of things break, for ex. when I_ like to send a file with Threema, I have to go offline, choose the file and then go online again. Otherwise the file dialoge does freeze. It&#x27;s just standard these days. Also a lot of things break, if you are just on a network without internet connection. Welcome in 2020.

Often when I would see this type of error it would be when something silently drops TCP packets (rather than sending a RST). This is one way to configure a firewall, and it&#x27;s indistinguishable from high latency. Hence the difference in behavior. If the address was unroutable, or immediately closed the connection, it would fail quickly (and presumably for the OCSP check, it would be skipped immediately). But when packets are silently dropped, it&#x27;s up to the client to decide how long to wait for an ACK, which might cause a hang.I&#x27;ve seen an identical problem where Chrome would hang for minutes when loading sites, and it was because I was in a firewalled environment that was outright dropping packets to Chrome&#x27;s OCSP server.

Wait what happens if you don&#x27;t have an internet connection? Can Macs not be used offline any more, surely that&#x27;s still a relatively common use case for a laptop even today in a lot of places?

This seems to explain why my Mac was nearly unusable after a reboot last week. Turns out bind crashed on my firewall leaving me with no DNS.After I restarted it I could actually launch apps other than terminal again.

You need to set up your own DNS caching resolver and start selectively filtering out Apple domains. Pihole does that wonderfully. Ask your Apple geniuses whether they would help you setting it to make your Macs work.

Give me, the owner of the computer, over the keystore for the root certificates I trust, and code signing is great.&gt; I&#x27;m mostly libertarian, but if I ever become a president, this would be one of the first things I&#x27;d make illegal, right after shortening the copyright term to like 3 years.As a libertarian I can see the argument for getting rid of presumptive copyright (and tanking the US economy), but the government preventing people from entering into contracts that you don&#x27;t like? That&#x27;s just hypocritical.

Code signing is an okay thing as long as the signing identities don&#x27;t get discriminated. Android has had code signing ever since it was released, but you always generated the certificate yourself, and the purpose was simply to stop someone else from making an apk with the same package id that would install over yours and gain access to its data.The thing Apple does, on the other hand, with trusting themselves more than the user, is disgusting. I&#x27;m mostly libertarian, but if I ever become a president, this would be one of the first things I&#x27;d make illegal, right after shortening the copyright term to like 3 years.

You&#x27;ve got to be kidding me. When Apple&#x27;s servers are down, all Macs worldwide start freezing randomly? My XCode is hanging during builds, is this why?This code signing enforcement stuff has gone way too far. Heads should roll for this.

This is brutal.I&#x27;ve found a work around for now.* Turn off wifi* Reboot* Open everything you need* Turn wifi back on

Adding:
0.0.0.0 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ocsp.apple.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ocsp.apple.com</a>
to &#x2F;private&#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts solves it.Can&#x27;t believe Big Sur is somehow affecting my Mohave Mac! Yikes!

Having this issue on a 13&#x27; MBP. Running this to append ocsp.apple.com to the hosts file did the trick:echo &#x27;127.0.0.1 ocsp.apple.com&#x27; | sudo tee -a &#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts

You are right. I was just letting off some steam. I am just really frustrated with a company that I respected for so many years, going downhill so much over the last 5-6 years.

Maybe so, but please don&#x27;t post unsubstantive comments here. We&#x27;re trying for something a bit different.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

Apple software quality and design is a joke.

I don’t understand how salted hashes would obfuscate the query. Private information retrieval is much more complicated than private password storage, and how do we know what the protocol is?

A centralized repository of all your executable hashes is a high precision fingerprint.

For one, they now have a list of everyone running Tor.

They can perfectly do that without recurring to sending the hashes, using asymmetric cryptography.But... this way the also gather some data.

&gt; Champions of privacy, phoning home a hash of every executable your computer runs!What’s the matter with privacy? That’s a basic signature check, and you can do so while preserving privacy by using salted hashes or a similar solution.

Enablers, that is what they are. If the EU manages to push that anti-encryption thing through, Apple will be the one forced to remove the App from your PC. 1984 is here already.

Soon, phoning home a hash of every file your computer has.

Champions of privacy, phoning home a hash of every executable your computer runs!

In this case, isn&#x27;t the hash of the binary consistent across all devices, so Apples can in fact derive exactly which binary you&#x27;re running (assuming they have a large database of application binary and hashes)?

It reveals how often I am running new software, it reveals what time of day I run new software, it reveals what networks I connect from

&quot;Hey Siri, select every Tor Browser user in America for additional screening.&quot;

&gt; I don&#x27;t know about you, but hashes of the binaries I run don&#x27;t exactly reveal any sensitive personal information about me.If they know the hash of (let&#x27;s say) a pr0n app which you run, then I&#x27;d say that&#x27;s pretty damn sensitive information Apple is getting.

What about the hash of a password cracking binary or the hash of some sort of binary used for piracy or stripping DRM off of something? Or just in general the ability to profile users based on the apps they use seems completely trivial. I imagine it would not take a particularly brilliant data scientist to correlate people who use FTP programs or developer programs or whatever else with people who buy high value items from certain e-commerce sites, for example. Seems like a marketer’s dream if they could ever get access to that. And sure Apple wouldn’t do that, today, on purpose, but are you 100% certain that could never happen? And if there was some way to tie that illegal piracy app binary hash to you personally and the government came knocking with a subpoena, seems like something Apple might be forced to comply with. It’s a very slippery slope.

I run Tor browser occasionally. That fact alone is sensitive personal information about me. It makes me stand out. Someday it might be held against me.I already expect the ISP to detect my Tor traffic.But I didn&#x27;t expect Apple, of all companies, to have a detailed audit trail of every time I&#x27;ve ever opened it, to the nearest minute.

The information reveals in exquisite detail what times of day I&#x27;m working, what times I&#x27;m slacking off, which days I work too.And whether I&#x27;m taking a long or short lunch break, or lots of breaks. Whether I stay in bed until late, or work late at night. It&#x27;s enough to predict whether I&#x27;m a &quot;good&quot; worker.It also reveals whenever I travel, which coffee shops and libraries I frequent and what times of day. It also reveals what time I open any of several video conferencing apps.And the sort of thing some HR would like to browse when assessing job candidates. They wouldn&#x27;t need to ask &quot;do you know X&quot;, they could just consult the Apple log of how often I run the relevant commands. Things like &quot;we see you ran &#x27;git&#x27; an average of 145 times per day last month, tell us more about that&quot;.And whether I&#x27;m running tools I &quot;shouldn&#x27;t&quot;.All that seems quite sensitive and personal to me.

I think that for some users, the applications they run and the frequency they run them at would be enough to identify them across time and accounts. I could change my identifier, even my name, but at the end of the day, I&#x27;ve been using the same apps for at least a decade more or less.

I don&#x27;t know about you, but hashes of the binaries I run don&#x27;t exactly reveal any sensitive personal information about me. That said, obviously they should have much more graceful degradation in place for when something is wrong with the service.

I experienced the issue with Mojave while this was happening. So not just Catalina.

Is this the one-time signature checking that has been in place since Catalina, or is this something else? (And if so is there any information about it?)

Has anyone confirmed if this outside the error-reporting agreement step?

Can you please provide resources for Ubuntu?

Sorry, not on Ubuntu.  It&#x27;s easy to check, compile a binary, run it, and use wireshark to watch your uplink.

This has happened since forever on Mac, Windows and Ubuntu.

I don&#x27;t know they&#x27;re not doing that, is the problem.  They probably aren&#x27;t, but as Bill Kristol offered recently, 99% sure isn&#x27;t 100% sure, and the fact that I&#x27;m not 100% sure is a problem unto itself.

I can&#x27;t tell if you&#x27;re being sarcastic or serious. Schrodinger&#x27;s sarcasm.

It’s not like Apple us building a database of apps you’ve launched linked to your address and social security number.Linked to your identity if you have a credit card saved for say iTunes.

&gt; Why is it scary that your computer checks for malware?It isn&#x27;t just checking for malware, its broadcasting your app opening behavior to apple and anyone else who might be listening.&gt; It’s not like Apple us building a database of apps you’ve launched linked to your address and social security number.You know this how? Seriously, I don&#x27;t get why you would believe that.

It&#x27;s only a matter of time and money: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;amp&#x2F;s&#x2F;mashable.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;apple-search.amp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;amp&#x2F;s&#x2F;mashable.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;apple-sear...</a>

Well it would be pretty good information to have to do analysis against.You could easily see knowing how often an app is used on an OS to be useful business information if apple wanted to create software to get into a trend before it gets to big.Of course that doesn&#x27;t require fine grained time data just daily would be more than good enough.However you could also see the business use of knowing if two pieces of software are often used together or sequentialy which could inform creating an all in one&#x2F;integrated experience that would do well in a market. So you need that finer application timing.Of course that doesn&#x27;t require tying it to a particular user account,not even a device ID, just a sessionID that changes each time the device restarts would probably be granular enough.However since we&#x27;ve got that other stuff in place per device wouldn&#x27;t it be great to see if there&#x27;s a correlation between people using an app on there Mac and using it or another App on there iphone, ipad, or watch. What piece of data can we include to match up a user across all their devices? Maybe some kind of obfuscated or derived userID.Of course you&#x27;d hope that other interests such as a commitment to privacy would rule out the use of such a dataset. If Apple did have such a dataset then you&#x27;d hope they&#x27;d be doing whatever processes (social, business, and technical) it can to obfuscate and seperate how that dataset is tied to a specific user.The only real argument against Apple not having it is the balance between the cost of creating&#x2F;exploiting such a data set, the expected profit, and the legal and reputational costs of such behaviour.

Why is it scary that your computer checks for malware?It’s not like Apple us building a database of apps you’ve launched linked to your address and social security number.

&gt; The amount of personal info they collect has exploded over the last couple years.Since maybe 2016-ish? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;FBI–Apple_encryption_dispute" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;FBI–Apple_encryption_dispute</a>

For anyone who wants to do this, you can do it here (at least if you are in the EU): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;privacy.apple.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;privacy.apple.com&#x2F;</a>

Having downloaded my data from both Apple and Google, &quot;Google levels of data collection&quot; seems inaccurate.

If you haven&#x27;t downloaded your data from Apple recently I suggest doing that. The amount of personal info they collect has exploded over the last couple years.Their Services business is moving them into Google levels of data collection.

Maybe it&#x27;s just me but the idea that my computer lets Apple (+ any LE organizations) surveil my app launches seems so much scarier than any malware.

Ah yes - the “poor X is worse than no X”-problem.It’s a huge problem on Windows where Explorer.exe still blocks the UI thread while it checks SMB shares if it thinks it can connect to them, but it skips them if it knows the computer is disconnected from a network. So using a Windows computer on a very spotty WLAN is actually more painful than being disconnected due to all the timeouts and dropped packets. Office Outlook is another main offender. I have a Windows Firewall rule just for Outlook.exe when I know it’s going to lock-up a lot.

It&#x27;s like no one at Apple has ever had sporadic internet access and they don&#x27;t plan for it. The Apple Music app does the same thing, if you are connected to wifi but don&#x27;t have internet access it takes 60 seconds for a song to start playing every time you click one. Because apparently that is a reasonable timeout for a UI action

So, yes: they do depend on the local (to the user) availability of that service. So they depend on that.

&gt; How can launching apps be depending on a cloud service being available...It&#x27;s not, per se. The apps will launch if you block the specific subdomain, or turn off internet. The problem is if the computer thinks it can connect and keeps trying.

And also, if you decide to implement such a horrible idea, how come you don&#x27;t have a proper plan for when shit happens?

Walled-garden strategy at the core of Apple&#x27;s business.

This is horrible. How can launching apps be depending on a cloud service being available...

Both my Hackintosh and MBAir are on Catalina and have been freezing repeatedly for the last hour. Definitely is effecting Catalina.

Is it a bug really or design problem where they are trying to do something they should not do in the first place.

Unacceptable ecosystem, for both 3rd party app devs and users. What I guess we won&#x27;t see - but need - is an apology from apple and a commitment to quickly fixing this bug.

Sad state of affairs that apps are slow because it can&#x27;t phone home to a server to verify it&#x27;s okay.

macOS unable to open any non-Apple application