Apple has always been the anti-Microsoft and Microsoft has always been the anti-Apple, pretty much in all respects. Speaking graphically: while Microsoft was unleashing Hideous on its Windows OS in the 1990s, Apple’s “Classic” OS was a thing of simplistic beauty, which then they fucked up with OS X but that’s another story. And while Microsoft shied away from its corporate logo, Apple steamrolled the entire country with its stores and its glowing apple logo as a beacon of simplicity and goodness. Lately Apple has also been fucking up its logo with extraneous texture effects, coupled with OS X and all the core Apple applications that have become ghastly, putting us Apple-devotees in a position where Apple being the anti-Microsoft is a negative thing. Microsoft’s commitment to graphic simplicity is what attracted us to Apple and its OS in the first place and now that that is disappearing it leaves these four, dumb squares as the next beacon of simplicity and goodness.

How does this kind of “blacklisting” occur on Mac OS X 10.8? I suppose in the future we might see restrictions that tie in to the new Gatekeeper signing system, but that is of no help if the targeted apps are not signed. The current mechanism is in the form of a crude XML file installed by Apple in your System folder:

/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/Exceptions.plist