lobsters score: 1 · tags: mac, security
I stopped using Claude Code after it started writing its own programs to search through my whole computer and makes changes as it sees fit to run “experiments”. This was a good reminder to actually go back and delete that piece of malware from my computer for good
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Yep it will write, build and run code at the slightest provocation, all the guardrails are entirely off.
I alone am responsible for the code I commit but Claude is happy to make whatever change.
It’s out of control and it’s despicable practice.
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Can I just tap out of using AI agents altogether, and go back to the “Full Disk Access” setup from Mac OS Snow Leopard, where we just used UNIX permissions?
That’d be my honest preference.
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Or you could admit to yourself you are not Apple’s target customer and draw the conclusion you need to move to Linux/BSD/whatever. I did about a year ago, and it’s been much less painful than I expected:
https://blog.majid.info/quit-apple/
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I daily drove Linux on my desktop for several years, and wound up back on mac because I needed to build things for iDevices again. I didn’t want two different daily driving systems, and there are actually some things that I like about Mac.
But if I no longer have that need next time I’m ready to cycle hardware, I’m likely to go back to Linux. If we don’t have good support for Affinity apps on Linux by then, I’ll probably keep an iPad around to run those.
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I’m not a professional artist, but I’ve found DarkTable and Inkscape a perfectly suitable replacement for my previous Mac apps. I hear you on not having multiple daily drivers but that ship sailed a long time ago for me, at last count I have 26 computers, 4 of them daily drivers.
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Then you just have malware scraping your home dir for bitcoin wallets and ssh keys anyway.
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I can keep the malware off my machine just fine, thankyouverymuch. It’s annoying not to be able to set normal permissions on my non-malware-using, non-agent-using machine.
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I can keep the malware off my machine just fine, thankyouverymuch.
We all like to think that, don’t we?
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What is the solution? To lock users out of any control of their devices, a la iOS? No thanks.
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I for one would hope that the controls just get more fine grained and allow you to be more precise.
Right now it’s not a lot of options: Downloads, Documents, Other-Apps-Stuff. But nothing like adding another folder or preventing your dot files from being access.
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Right now it’s not a lot of options: Downloads, Documents, Other-Apps-Stuff. But nothing like adding another folder or preventing your dot files from being access.
Yeah fine-grained controls seems nice. Only Qubes OS seems to provide anything close to that in the desktop space I think
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No, to allow users to have control over what resources on their system individual programs have access to. This has been an important goal for most OS security tools for the last 25 years including things like the TrustedBSD MAC framework (which Apple uses) and SELinux.
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Yeah I think this has been attempted in various ways over the years. The problem is that it can be really fiddly to configure. I think an example of this is SELinux. People tend to just disable it I think.
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and ssh keys anyway.
https://gist.github.com/arianvp/5f59f1783e3eaf1a2d4cd8e952bb4acf?permalink_comment_id=5877110
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Or FIDO U2F USB key backed ed25519-sk keys, supported by OpenSSH since 8.2 in 2020, more portable
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We are long into an arms race between our private data, and corporations who want us to install trinkets that will attempt to steal everything.
It’s not about AI specifically, they have been pulling this shit for years. AI is just making it worse.
Even if you don’t use AI directly, you can’t trust any app you install, and you can be pretty sure that even without intending to, you’re gonna install software that was written with AI. And who knows what it is going to pull.
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I’m unfamiliar with some of the tech stack at $WORK so I use Claude to navigate it. It’s very good at this sort of thing.
The Claude desktop app for MacOS was becoming more and more insistent on escalating privs that I ended up deleting it. It turns out that the web app works great if you add it to the dock from safari. It’s functionally identical to the desktop app but it doesn’t continually ask to install “plugins” in MacOS.
I used Claude code for a while, it is an excellent search engine for our large existing code base, but they took all the default guardrails away, so an innocuous prompt can have it write code, compile and attempt to run it, without permission.
I absolutely hate it. Using the products of these awful companies is bad enough. Giving them access to all my data is just asking for trouble.
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While I work 100% remote from home, I find it convenient to have a separate machine for work. They don’t want me to use the work machine for personal stuff, which is fine since they paid for it. This strikes both ways; I don’t want the work machine to have access to my home network, so it gets its own access point. I also don’t have any personal data on the work machine. I do have a few accounts I use in both contexts (GitHub, iCloud, etc) that I’ve been thinking of changing so agents on my work machine don’t have access to my personal accounts however.
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Yeah I WFH too. I have a separate MacOS account for work and non work. I never use Claude Code for my own projects but I’m not at all convinced that my personal stuff (or even my work stuff) is safe from these agents.
I have thought a few times about getting a separate machine for work but it feels wasteful. I might move to a coworking space next year, where it would make more sense. Also been thinking about moving to Linux since the latest MacOS update is no better than the last POS.
In the end it doesn’t really matter if it’s work or personal though, both environments contain private data and I’m not convinced any of these companies are incentivised to respect that.
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I found this quote from the MacStories post on the matter interesting:
Looking at this MacBook Pro, only a handful of apps to which I’ve granted Full Disk Access are backup apps. Others include the Finder replacement Bloom, launchers like Alfred, the wonderful selection utility PopClip, Apple’s own Pixelmator Pro, Setapp, TestFlight, Unread, Supercharge, Madden NFL 27 Arcade Edition, Hazel, and many others.
Half of the apps on this list have no reason whatsoever to be granted full disk access, and should not have it. If anything, this change might encourage developers to limit their products to only the access they actually need.
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It’s impressive how there are absolutely no details in this announcement… I learnt nothing. Seriously though, MacOS could really use a serious sandbox implementation that’s actually usable and documented. sandbox-exec is right there and waiting.
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Some kind of lightweight containers like I use for build and test on Windows and Linux would be amazing. Instead, just lock it down like an iPhone.
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That’s for running Linux containers not macos containers. I run my Linux containers on my Linux hosts. I want to run macos containers on my macos hosts.
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I pondered for a while how easy it would be for that tool to support macOS containers. It spins up a VM per container and mounts host files from there. The virtualisation framework that it uses already supports macOS guests. It would be nice even for testing compatibility with older macOS if Apple supported that officially.
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That’s still VMs. There are some tools for spinning up VMs that reuse some of the system install, but you’re still paying the memory overhead of a whole nested OS, which you don’t have on Linux, FreeBSD, etc.
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