This is, I'm afraid, part of a vision (of which Apple is the preeminent sponsor but Microsoft definitely believes it too, they're just less aggressive) where the OS vendor is presumed to know best and the owner of the computer's wishes are occasionally considered on an "if possible" basis.<p>Obviously they could allow whatever signatures go into SIP to be updated, so you could make changes and then bless your changed configuration, and it wouldn't really even be hard. But they consider most computer owners to be too stupid to be trusted with that kind of power. And, they do have a point, a lot of users would happily do any super unsafe things they're told, just in exchange for a promise of a free game or a cracked version of Photoshop or whatever.<p>It's just sad for those of us who remember that computers used to really be almost infinitely customizable. If you didn't like something, and you cared enough, you could fix it. I assume that soon, SIP won't be a thing you could turn off even if you wanted, and while you will still be able to get a root shell on a Mac it'll eventually be on some virtualized entity whose permissions are curtailed to only a sandboxed environment.
Apple needs to allow users to defeat certain security mechanism without disabling SIP. The "all or nothing" approach will end up with a lot of people going "nothing" or leaving the platform. Not everyone faces the same risks.<p>Something like (just typing this out, haven't thought it through): Having Apple associate your hardware with an apple id. Logging into apple id and registering a key. Apple signs key and you can install key on the specific hardware. You can then use said key to sign a security policy.<p>The key can be removed by install Apple's default key by anyone, increasing the security level back to normal.
Bartender [0] hides and rearranges icons by manipulating how the menu bar gets rendered. IIUC, it takes screenshots of the menu bar and uses them to cover certain areas of it. This might be another promising approach for hiding the orange dot.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.macbartender.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.macbartender.com/</a>
"Oh, and it also appears in screen recordings, which annoys me as well whenever I want to demo something."<p>If only there was a way to take that screen recording into some bit of software and cover up this part of the image so that it no longer offends in this precious bit of content. It's not like you're going to post that RAW screen recording session to some place without doing anything else to it in a professional manner, are you?<p>I actually forgot about the menu bar in macOS ever since they gave me the ability to hide it like the dock. When I don't need it, it's out of the way recovering precious extra rows of screen height. When I do need it, it just magically reappears.<p>"It can also be a distraction for a specific group of people struggling with attention deficit."<p>If you are distracted by a dot, how are you not distracted by all of the other info in the menu bar too?
From the previous HN thread linked from this article, it seemed like the “officially supported” ways to avoid the orange dot for live performance and editing video were either a hardware capture device, or an app that uses an API to output raw video to a window/display.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29627382" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29627382</a>
I finished the article and was wondering if the author will show a image of how the dot looks like, and later find out that the first "image" is a video, and Firefox blocked the auto-play leaving the first frame that doesn't contain the dot. Have to right click on it and select play to reproduce it. I like that feature and avoid things moving around without interaction, but I think Firefox should put an overlay with a play button on native web videos, at least on mouse hover, isn't the first time I have to right click to know if is a video.<p>And for the author, the use of descriptions at the bottom of images/videos is good for accessibility, a description like "Screen recording of the dot appearing" will avoided my confusion, and persons using screen readers will know it too (I checked and in the code there isn't a alt text for that (question: the alt="description" works for <video> like is used in <image>?)).
macos 13.3 introduced another dot, a blue dot for location services. Unfortunately it seems to severely interfere with games. For example, playing Asphalt9 from the mac app store, on macOS 13.3, whenever the blue dot appears, which seems to happen almost every minute, the game's audio stops, any attached game controller becomes unresponsive, and if you were actively playing a single player race, the game pauses and shows the pause menu, as if you had changed focus to a different application. After about 10 seconds, the blue dot disappear and the game controller becomes responsive again, allowing you to unpause the game. This makes any attempt at actually playing the game an exercise in anger management.
While we're here, does anyone know a way to keep FileVault enabled with SIP disabled? It seems like a huge anti-privacy measure from Apple. Want control of your system? No FDE for you!
TLDR; No, you can't (for now).<p>This was a little bit of an uncomfortable read as I really didn't want to see this defeated, but I'm glad people are checking that it works as intended. The pessimist in me fears that when SIP bypasses are found this will be ready to go as part of a RAT. Realistically though the authors of RATs probably didn't need the example.