GitHub Copilot for Xcode

With regard to the simple ten step process to install the extension, I love it. It’s this kind of stuff that kept me employed as a Windows administrator for so long.

The Mac vs PC UAC commercial was peak Apple. Ever since then they have been steadily on the path to making macOS the very thing they mocked.

Remember the days where all you needed to do was enter your admin password, and an installer or script could do the rest?

Has anyone ever, even a little bit, demonstrated that forcing users to do something in ten awkward steps rather than one easy step hampers malware in any appreciable way?

It works with Obj-C?! Does Xcode?

@Bri it does a little bit.

Problem is the scammers are much more motivated than the legitimate companies to write really well working software and really effective end user instructions.

Installing software you want requires lots of hoops, meanwhile I've watched Powershell scripts encrypting workstations while antivirus etc sits blissfully on the sidelines letting it happen.

Users can't manage to get remote sessions started with legitimate tech support, but scammers make highly notated instruction pages with pictures pointing to the correct locations and everything.

@Bart I think that bolsters my point, though. Since now *everything* requires something akin to ten annoying steps, the scammers just trick users into following their own ten annoying steps to compromise their system. The users naively follow the steps because it's not at all out of the ordinary. And that's for malware that doesn't find exploits to get around the security in the first place, and as we've seen, there's been no shortage of exploitable bugs.

In the end, the same number of people get scammed, nothing is any more protected than it was before, but everyone is constantly annoyed, inconvenienced, and unable to configure their computer meaningfully any longer, not to mention developers having to put in so many days of extra work to get their software to jump through these hoops. It just seems to me like this approach is a total failure.

Saying it's a failure, though, is assuming that the reason for all this security theater is actually security. These days I'm inclined to think it's more about control.

@Bri It’s a huge tax on developers, because even after jumping through the hoops, you continually have customers who need extra help with the steps (or working around issues where the security features don’t work as advertised) and some number of them (especially for less developery products) will just give up.

Don't I know this! Part of my work involves a software product containing a DriverKit extension, two apps that require Accessibility permission, and one that needs screen recording permission. So many users can't navigate all of that properly. And then there's the times where the system bugs out and the permissions don't work...

"More than a quarter of new code created at Google is generated by AI, said CEO Sundar Pichai on Tuesday during the company’s Q3 earnings call."

I wonder what that actually means. If I type 'println("He' and Copilot suggests 'llo World");', did it just write 50% of my code? Because if that's how it's counted, then the number is both meaningless and oddly low.

"It’s a huge tax on developers"

That's the main issue, and another reason for just shipping a web app instead of dealing with this crap.

Aside from the misleading “Accessibility”
permission, I guess what’s sad here is that Apple doesn’t seem to be on any path to _improve_ their TCC UX.

They seem to mostly just look at their metrics, see various privacy and security abuses, and _re_act to those. But they _act_ very little.