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Fighting Back

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Consider this a Catalina resource page.

All that hysteria. About code-signing. And draconian kernels. That's only for the unwashed. You get it, right? It's not for you. Not for the admin or developer. Only for the riffraff. The fanboys.

And of course it wasn't enough to merely warn people about untrusted sources - and to arbitrarily decide what's trusted and what's not - no, now you gotta SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF THEM. And to scare them, YOU GOTTA SOMETIMES MISLEAD THEM. But who the fuck cares, right?

For all we developers - we know it's all hogwash.

The real developers - the developers with balls - they just ignore the bullshit and carry on. They don't code-sign. Don't code-sign shit. But they're rare.

Because integrity is second (or third or fourth or lower) to the dollar. And indie developers will suck up to anything and anyone to get that dollar. Right?

Suppose you don't. Suppose you don't suck up. Suppose you're one of a rare breed that actually put integrity first. One of the ones who doesn't like sticking it to their clients and friends, out of deference to the soon-to-be billionaires over at One Deplorable Loop. Suppose you're one of them?

Easy to do! Just TELL THE TRUTH! And better still: show people how to get out from under this GDR v2.0 conjured up by the evil beasts in Cupertino.

Here's how you start!

1. Take them by their tiny sweaty hands and introduce them to the command line. Teach them to open a Terminal.app window. And to then type in the following.

xattr -csrv ~/Downloads

Teach everyone you know. And have them teach others.

2. Go one better: get them to download the free CLIX and create the above as a CLIX command.



Then they can invoke the command whenever they need - whenever they download something.

For that command will completely cleanse their download from the GATEKEEPER. Then they can run whatever they want, with no interference from Apple's Tiny Tim.

Get everyone you know to download (the free) CLIX and do this.

3. Get the free appleclean. Make sure everyone you know has this. Put appleclean on your computer, run appleclean to clean itself, then keep it around.

All they need to do is keep a Terminal.app window open. (No, this one will not run from CLIX - appleclean needs to know about its working directory, and invoking this from elsewhere confuses Apple's 'shell'.)

4. Get them to punt for Xfile or the ACP. They're both incredible deals. We're talking about a price of less than $2 per application. IT'S MEANT TO BE CHEAP AND FRIENDLY. And once they have either package, they can start using fancier software, so they can completely automate the neutralisation of 'Apple Inc'.

5. Lightman. Lightman is a diagnostic tool, but it also watches whoever's watching. And now it incorporates Rixstep's Seahaven Technology. That technology will watch your ~/Downloads directory and attempt to clean whatever shows up there.



6. CandS. 'CandS' stands for 'Clean and Seal'. You drag things onto the CandS window in default mode. You can also recurse through a directory hive. So CandS cleans away all GATEKEEPER cruft and then seals the files so GATEKEEPER can do it again.



7. KEYMASTER! Keymaster technology is the evolution of Seahaven Technology. Keymaster goes down deeper into the operating system. Keymaster flags any or all of your most used home directories for complete neutralisation of Apple Inc. And it all takes place in the background. Once Keymaster starts, you can leave it alone - you can minimise it, or you can hide it. Keymaster will keep doing its job for you.

And Keymaster goes one better than even the above: it namely circles around its prey and pounces one more time (after a brief respite) to make sure the job's been done.

So far Keymaster has proven to be impregnable - literally impregnable.

- Changes is another utility you get with either Xfile or the ACP. Changes is a configurable utility for watching exactly what's going on in your system, thanks to the Apple you used to trust. Changes is what made it possible to create Keymaster.



Armed with all of that, both the unwitting user and the demanding developer or admin can have an easy time of it.

Have fun, drive safely, inebriate in moderation, be good to your friends, and Happy New Year.

After the New Year? Figure out what your home and/or your corporation will be using for OS and hardware in the future. For it's certainly not going to be Apple.

About Rixstep

Stockholm/London-based Rixstep are a constellation of programmers and support staff from Radsoft Laboratories who tired of Windows vulnerabilities, Linux driver issues, and cursing x86 hardware all day long. Rixstep have many years of experience behind their efforts, with teaching and consulting credentials from the likes of British Aerospace, General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Lloyds TSB, SAAB Defence Systems, British Broadcasting Corporation, Barclays Bank, IBM, Microsoft, and Sony/Ericsson.

Rixstep and Radsoft products are or have been in use by Sweden's Royal Mail, Sony/Ericsson, the US Department of Defense, the offices of the US Supreme Court, the Government of Western Australia, the German Federal Police, Verizon Wireless, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Microsoft Corporation, the New York Times, Apple Inc, Oxford University, and hundreds of research institutes around the globe. See here.

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