* * * * *

              “He's one of the old gods! He demands sacrifice!”

Another day, another Mac OS-X automatic update.

I'm growing leary of Mac OS-X updates. I'm also growing leary of Apple in
general. I'm not saying I refuse to use their products–heavens no! Chez Boca
is slowly turning into Apple territory with one Mac mini [1], A Mac laptop
[2], an iPad [3] and two iPhones [4]. The computers just work (and give it
time Bunny—you'll get use to the interface, trust me).

[Yes, Calvin is a god of the underworld! And the puny inhabitants of earth
displease him!] [5]But I get the feeling that doing anything a bit out of the
ordinary is punished, for Steve Jobs [6] is not a kind and loving god—he's
one of the old gods! He demands sacrifice! His way, or no way.

The only change I've made to the system is to have syslogd forward its logs
on the Mac to my Linux system (and to do that, I had to figure out how to
edit /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist, which is a binary
file, to add one command line option to syslogd when it starts) and the last
time my Mac auto-updated (last month) it completely overwrote my changes and
I lost an hour trying to remember how I initially set it up and troubleshoot
why it wasn't working properly.

Thanks, Steve.

More troubling though, are some of the logs I'm seeing from the Mac. Such as:

> fc00::3 | /usr/libexec/taskgated | user debug | May 02 15:48:15 | no
> system signature for unsigned /Applications/Firefox.app[18605]
>

(pardon the rather unorthodox output from my syslogd [7])
The only executables that are thus logged are those that I compiled, or have
been downloaded off the Internet (like Firefox [8] for instance). The man
page for taskgated says this:

> **taskgated** is a system daemon that implements a policy for the
> task_for_pid system service. When the kernel is asked for the task port of
> a process, and preliminary access control checks pass, it invokes this
> daemon (via launchd) to make the decision.
>

which doesn't reassure me all that much. Also, given the control that Apple
exerts over the iPhone and iPad software ecosystem, how long until Apple
starts tightening its grip over the software echosystem of the Mac?

Okay, I doubt they'll go so far as to remove the ability of third party
applications from running on the Mac, but still … if I have to worry about
every update reversing changes I've made to the system …

[1] http://www.apple.com/macmini/
[2] http://www.apple.com/macbook/
[3] http://www.apple.com/ipad/
[4] http://www.apple.com/iphone/
[5] gopher://gopher.conman.org/gPhlog:2011/05/02/god.gif
[6] http://www.allaboutstevejobs.com/
[7] https://github.com/spc476/syslogintr
[8] http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Email author at [email protected]