Recently, I noted a couple of new kinds of tools that would be available for macOS that go beyond Apple’s built-in support to block malicious activity and protect your files. Since then, I’ve tested one of the packages extensively, Little Flocker, and am taking a delighted hard look at another, BlockBlock.
Apple errs on the side of reducing problems for the majority of its customers, who don’t want to manage a computer: they want to use it. For instance, across several releases of Mac OS X, Apple had a series of three radio buttons in the Security & Privacy system preference pane that control which apps could launch by default. You could limit to App Store apps only, good for inexperienced users, kids, and perhaps parents; App Store and Identified Developers, which added software that had a registered Apple developer attached who had used Apple’s processes to sign the app cryptographically to show it hadn’t been tampered with and identify its origins; and Anywhere, which allowed all unsigned software to run.
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