Friday, February 24, 2017
El Capitan SIP and why I wont be upgrading any of my Macs ever
El Capitan SIP and why I wont be upgrading any of my Macs ever
For all of the Apple computers I own, I am not a very good Mac fanboy. Every single OS X release thats come out, well... since they simply started calling it "OS X" (dropping the "Mac" part that harkens back to the operating systems roots) has put me off just a little bit more. It really started with the enforcement of "Gatekeeper" with the release of Mountain Lion; removing (by default) the ability for and end user to install software from anywhere but the Mac App Store or verified third parties, eg; Microsoft Office for Mac. The change, albeit minor and certainly something that was easily sidestepped foreshadowed something that did not bode well for the end user.
I remember clearly commenting to a colleague upon seeing Gatekeeper. I said
"Watch, one day youre going to have to jailbreak your iMac!"
Well, that may not be what were calling it, but thats what it amounts to. With the release of OS X 10.11 "El Capitan", the system now uses a "feature" called SIP (System Integrity Protection), which, as per Apples OWN DIALOGUE is a "rootless" system. Ostensibly, by removing the ability to access root access from system files and sandboxing application into the user space, it should theoretically create a much more secure computing environment.
This is essentially how iOS (as well as Android) are designed. In other words, theyve removed root from OS X. As a result, multiple apps I use frequently that make system level changes to the operating system in order to make the fugly and awkward pseudo tablet interface usable again, are effectively broken. With El Capitan, my beautiful, sleek and powerful iMac has been reduced to little more than a glorified iPad, sans touch screen.
Supposedly, there was a way to turn off SIP from the recovery, so I followed the instructions, rebooted into recovery, applied the changes (csrutil disable) and booted back to my desktop, and lo and behold, SIP was still enabled.
I am pissed!
Fuck you Apple. When I first started using OS X back in the Snow Leopard days, I loved it. But every single release since then has been absolute crap! I swear, that company is lost without Steve Jobs at the helm. As for me, Im going to be rolling all of my computers back to Mavericks and I wont be upgrading them. Ever again. Not until you get rid of SIP. And since locking users into your ecosystem where software is only fed to them from the Apple mother ship is obviously the end goal here, when you stop releasing security updates, Ill probably end up switching back to Linux, permanently.
Available link for download
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