Apple gives two fucks about media pressure. Their longstanding history of giving in to pressure almost exclusively is responsive to their users, either:
- pro/dev users who act as their trend setters (see recent backpedals on keyboards and Mac Pro form factor)
- people hacking stuff where it’s popular enough they want more influence on the UX (bootcamp)
I cited a pretty huge example (bootcamp) where there was no media pressure at all. There was definitely tech pressure, but the media had no dog in the fight.
Its possible that they saw it as a purely positive move that would improve security on MacOS and then after seeing everyone's response they reevaluated its importance.
or they started getting security bugs from the fuzzer teams. (it's a hard problem to sanitize so many exectutables, and the people who use VPNs are probably high-value customers, like business people wfh)
Having to be told by outsiders that this backdoor could be abused by malware is pretty embarrassing. It's hard to imagine Apple's engineers weren't aware of that.
As much the community wants to think they are evil and want to purposefully violate trust, most often the easier explanation works very well. Its an oversight or a resourcing issue.
"Some system processes bypassing NetworkExtensions in macOS is a bug, in case you were wondering."
Reply[2] by David Dudok de Wit, developer of TripMode:
"Glad to see it's being reconsidered as a bug, because Apple told us it 'behaves as designed' (FB7740671 + FB7665551). And why is there an exclusion list in the first place? I'd love to know more and see this documented."
Reply[3] by Russ:
"Can't get too specific but I promise it's really mundane/boring software development stuff... like two features that interact in an unintended way kind of boring."
Comment[4] on Russ's original tweet by Sérgio Silva:
"Yes. A bug with its own configuration file /System/Library/Frameworks/NetworkExtension.framework/Resources/Info.plist ContentFilterExclusionList"
The tweet by the Apple developer has been deleted - hope he didn't lose job, and at worst only earned a reprimand. (Nobody with experience would call it a bug, when it was clearly a deliberate design decision).
Inexperience is less concerning than trying to publicly whitewash the misdeeds of a corporation. I'm not sure you can even chalk this up to inexperience; my charitable guess is he probably didn't look at the code or config, assumed the company he likes would only do something like this by accident, went to twitter to say as much, then got a little carried away in the heat of it.
As much as I'd like to believe it was just an oversight, how do you accidentally have your services bypass the firewall? That feels like it would have to be a deliberate choice under the assumption that "our apps are signed by us, and the OS verifies that, so all traffic through these apps should be OK, right?" I don't mean this snarkily; it's a genuine question. I don't know how OSes work.
My guess is that this started small (“we shouldn’t let firewalls block security updates or Find My Mac”) and once that mechanism was there people kept adding other things to it thinking about support (security filters are notorious for people blocking things without understanding the implications and then file big reports) but not the users who would be upset about not being able to block those services.
I don't see why half the shit in that list would be needed during a recovery process, let alone need to bypass a VPN as well. If Apple wants to claim this as their defense, let them. Until then, I see little value in dreaming up excuses they aren't willing to make for themselves.
