Revisited: The true and false security benefits of Mac app notarization

This is a follow-up to my recent blog posts Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15 and The internet is full of experts. I've read a lot of the discussion about and responses to my blog posts, which has forced me to hone my own thinking and arguments on the subject. I characterized Apple's new Enhanced Visual Search feature as a privacy...

My recent blog post Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15 has received widespread attention, and perhaps inevitably, it has also received widespread criticism by random internet commenters. A common criticism is that I somehow discredited myself by stating, honestly, "I don't understand most of the technical details of Apple's blog...

This morning while perusing the settings of a bunch of apps on my iPhone, I discovered a new setting for Photos that was enabled by default: Enhanced Visual Search. (I manually disabled it before taking the screenshot below.) Apps > Photos"> This setting is also new to Photos on macOS Sequoia, and enabled by default. Oddly, this new feature has...

This blog post has undergone some revision and correction since first published. It turns out, contrary to my initial assumption, that the code signatures of the apps is largely irrelevant. Thanks to Avi Drissman of the Google Chrome team for assistance! According to the Apple Developer Documentation, "macOS Launch Services is an API that enables...

Yesterday, Apple released Safari version 18.2, included with iOS 18.2 and macOS 15.2, as a separate update for macOS 14 and 13. I've already discussed one new feature of Safari 18.2, Copy Link with Highlight, in another blog post. Now I'd like to discuss another new feature, automatic https upgrade. From Apple's announcement: Safari 18.2 on iOS,...