YHK - yet another hacker news clone

> Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems—including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history—without users’ full knowledge and understanding. For communication apps, this can also compromise the privacy of the people users are communicating with.

As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy.

So as always, for the sake of "privacy" Apple needs to take action to protect the users from "themselves", and make it undesirable to grant others the same access Apple has...

https://pxlnv.com/blog/macos-full-disk-access-restrictions/

> ...the uses of Full Disk Access go well beyond the category of backup apps, and it is worrisome to see Apple give it such a limited frame. I have given that permission to disk management utilities, Sketch, Terminal, and other apps I do not want to be throwing permissions requests as I move around my drives. Is Apple suggesting this capability could be limited in the future to backup applications alone? I do not like that.

If Full Disk Access were, in future, to be something that I could not grant to (for instance) the Terminal, because it is not a backup app, that would severely limit my ability to do work on a Mac, both as hobbyist and as computer professional.

I agree that the agent situation is a fairly serious concern; I just don't want to see Apple throw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater.

This brought to mind Neal Stephenson's essay "Unix - The Hole Hawg of Operating Systems" from back in the day (1999):

> I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs, which it did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few six-inch-diameter holes through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I chucked in a new hole saw, went up to the second story, reached down between the newly installed floor joists, and began to cut through the first-floor ceiling below. Where my homeowner's drill had labored and whined to spin the huge bit around, and had stalled at the slightest obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid consistency of a spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel pipe handle and a joist, producing a few lacerations, each surrounded by a wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. It also bent the hole saw itself, though not so badly that I couldn't use it. After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror.

> But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner's product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure to envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it.

* http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html

* 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28015229

> The problem is that for my particular use case — a headless, always-on Mac Mini that I primarily access from other computers and my phone through the ChatGPT and Claude apps — macOS is incredibly hostile

> As noted by the NCSC, the vulnerability is being exploited when port 5900 is exposed to the Internet. When screen sharing is turned on, the macOS firewall opens the port. Routers and dedicated firewalls generally block the port unless configured to override that setting.

> Obviously I should have — and will be — using a VPN going forward (the foundation of my entire approach to security is Tailscale); what I will note, however, is that TCC basically leaves me no choice but to have screen sharing enabled if I want to actually use my Mac Mini in the way I want to use it. I use screen-sharing constantly — including from my phone — and almost every time it’s to click “OK” on a stupid prompt that I’ve long since stopped taking seriously.

On the plus side, at least he didn't run the AI agent on the computer with all of his personal data.

There is no Linux that will run on anyhing newer than M4 and even that is incomplete.

Exposing any port directly to the Internet is a huge risk these days—at minimum I'd put a very strong firewall in front, and unless it's serving the general public, switch to a non standard port. It's not much but would prevent the dumb automated scripts that operate on standard ports.

So has macOS. It’s just a matter that the agents don’t bother to use the existing permission layers.

But I'm sure the day of the iOS-based iMac will come, and pandora's box will be opened. Businesses will love it, especially those with Kiosk use-cases, and not before long we will read everywhere (including here) how superior the security is to a Mac for everyday use...

Can you blame them? Their managers cannot code, so they need something else that is "useful" to do. And the one thing they find useful is to increase revenue.

You are on the wrong site if you think that HN was ever a bastion of the hyper OSS mindset.

This is a site powered by and run by one of the arms of a startup incubator/investor. It has always been clear on that.

Just because it has “hacker” in the name doesn’t mean what you think it means.

What Gruber didn't realize is that Apple gives its engineers special internal tools that can bypass the restrictions we on the outside have to suffer.

I'm sure it's also the case that internal development macOS builds are compiled differently than public release builds. They basically have to be for Apple engineers to modify them during development.

I got confused for a second how Claude Code and agents are related to this piece. Of course they aren't. Anyone with a half brain about securing their system would never run into any of this in the first place. Hiring Claude Code to do scanning every half an hour is such a waste of tokens.