It's a game company. Odds are, they never valued programmers or artists.

Sorry Ami, but I'm gonna have to give a bit of a counter here.

Starfleet Academy was referenced in TNG and DS9 as a prestigious institution, only accepting the best. Wesley Crusher and Nog were both shown as really needing to be at the top of their game in order to be accepted into the academy. In Academy...pretty much everything was "find yourself and who you feel you really are, and the team will work around that".

Meanwhile, the setup for the story was that Holly Hunter left Starfleet because she was upset about a particular mother and son (Caleb) she separated when she was a judge, so she left, and now Starfleet needs Her In Particular to be a professor at Starfleet Academy (really, a whole universe full of people and we need one person who wasn't a teacher and resigned?), and she goes to find Caleb In Particular to join Starfleet because he's good at everything, in exchange for helping him find his mother...except that the "find my mother" plot thread is barely there, and not even Caleb seems to care for most of the season.

As the show gets going, Starfleet Academy (the institution) takes place on a ship that can just land and be a building, depending on what's necessary...and they go on a bunch of super dangerous missions that really require seasoned officers to do, but they have a bunch of cadets doing stuff they clearly shouldn't be doing...for, some reason. And they go out in space to do it instead of doing it all on the holodeck where it's far safer for...some reason. And, somehow, they're almost never in class in this college, except for one episode where we watch them be in debate class. Okay, fine, but...no engineering classes? No tactical training? No indication that they're actually learning to do the things we've seen Starfleet officers doing in the field?

Most of the show centered around the interpersonal drama, and I'll even grant some leniency here because it was pitched as having a "Dawson's Creek / Harry Potter" sort of coming-of-age focus. uhm...okay, fine...but quite a number of episodes had so much of that sort of focus, that it barely needed to be "Star Trek" to do it. They brought in the 'war college' to create some allusion to the Harry Potter houses, but do we spend a meaningful amount of time with sympathetic characters in The War College? No, we don't. Do we have any meaningful thought put behind the possibility that perhaps there's a need for a military-focused part of Starfleet in a universe that has physics-defying pirates (the last episode requiring an impossible feat of travel and resource acquisition), the way that Enterprise had the MACO's or the Elite Force games had the Hazard Team? ...no, they should join Starfleet Academy instead, where we learn nothing because Caleb already knows everything, everywhere, ever! And SAM only needed to realize that she's wonderful and perfect and had nothing to learn at all, so of course she's a perfect candidate for an institution of higher learning!

Finally, at least for my personal opinion, I found absolutely every single character insufferable for one reason or another. Holly Hunter is a captain-slash-professor who tells her leadership to get bent, and is shocked when the cadets have authority issues? I forget her name, but the Jem Hadar lady was generally annoying and useless, and somehow I got the feeling that half the cadets could have taken her in hand-to-hand combat. Caleb was "the key to everything", Genesis was every popular girl trope simultaneously, Ja'den was the living embodiment of 'not-Klingon'. The writers were clearly going for 'child-like' with SAM, but ended up at 'child-ish' instead. Tig Notaro was Tig Notaro playing Tig Notaro. You get the point.

Please note that I got through my whole list of exceptions without complaining one bit about "wokeness" or "politics in Star Trek" or anything related to it.

It all depends on who you are optimizing for.

• Parents with kids would do better on standard time, because they have to take their kids to school before work.
• Everyone else with a 9-to-5 job may do better on DST, assuming a short commute distance, because sunrise at 7:20 instead of 8:20 just adds useless time before the morning commute, while sundown at 5:53 means driving home before dark.

There is no one correct answer, because which one fits your circadian rhythms better depends entirely on what time you wake up.

I believe you misspelled "slower than molasses in February".

If they break into a car and the police look at the footage on the dashcam and see that they've kept their license plate out of view, but they are able to cross-correlate it with other cameras and figure out the plate number, then figure out where they drove that car, where it ended up parked, who got out, where they went, etc., then it can make arrests possible where it was not possible previously, making it *massively* more likely to be able to solve the crime.

The problem becomes when it turns into "show us all the plates that were near that spot within a few minutes of that time", and thus a fishing expedition.

You're interpreting it in the context of typing "sudo" on the command-line granting a one-time permission. And the original statement from Apple (after correcting the "every -> very" error in the summary) makes it clear that this is *not* what is being proposed, so if that was the original poster's intent, then it was incorrect.

The way I interpreted the original sentence — "They're going to make it like sudo where when you give permission to a program to write protected files once it has it forever after" — is that they're going to make it like the sudoers file, where you edit it to grant permission to a program to do something, and it permanently has the right to do that... which is exactly what happens when you grant full disk permission, just with a dialog box instead of editing a file.

That said, I'm not sure if that's how the original statement was intended to be interpreted. It was a bit confusing. :-)

Nope. And this is why I object to the phrase "censorship is bad". *Unreasonable* censorship is bad. But not all restraint on speech is bad.

No, you're confusing the definition of censorship with what restraints on free speech are constitutional. You're defining the term based on legality in a specific jurisdiction. If you applied the same standard with a different jurisdiction — say what can legally be spoken in Iran — you would get a very different definition. This is why you cannot define censorship based on a specific legal standard. It must be defined in the abstract.

The general definition is that censorship is the suppression of expression by an authority. That expression could be a constitutionally protected idea, or it could be an advertisement for Taco Bell. It's still expression, and blocking it is still censorship.

And again, you're using the U.S. definition of free speech to define censorship. These things are not synonymous. Nobody is talking about whether someone should have to listen to you. The fact that someone shut you up is still censorship. It may be *constitutionally allowable* censorship. It may even be *entirely* *reasonable* censorship. But it is still censorship.

Not all censorship is bad. Restraints on speech based on time, place, and manner restrictions can be entirely reasonable. They are still, at least in a purely abstract way, a form of censorship. Restraints on speech where your speech costs someone else money can also be entirely reasonable (e.g. spam, robodialers, etc.). But those decisions still represent censorship in the abstract. We simply choose to say that those types of restraints on speech are reasonable and necessary for a functioning society.

It's all about balancing rights — your right to swing your fist ends when it meets my nose, and all that. Censorship is generally justifiable when exercising your right to speech has the effect of violating someone else's rights. For example, if you call for violence and that violence happens, you can get thrown in jail, and your rights to free speech can be massively curtailed. This is, however, still censorship in a purely abstract sense.

Oh, also, each agent runner should have:

• read-write access to a per-agent temporary directory
• read-write access to a cross-agent-shared temporary directory
• read-only access to other agents' private temporary directories

But this is the trivial part.

That's how it already works. But you can request the permission from the user with a pop-up. Presumably a "very explicit action" means going into the Settings app and turning it on by hand.

But that's going to do exactly nothing. The app will tell them that they have to do this, and the users, having no idea how dangerous it is to give an AI unrestricted access to their device, will do it anyway, and we'll be right back to where we are now. And the next step will be "See, we can't allow full disk access." And then macOS will cease to be usable.

The only reasonable choice is to flag Meta's software as malware for extending their full disk access to agents. Force them to implement a proper sandbox. Apple already gives them all the tools they need to do it right.

• The main host app asks for full disk access, but functions without it, triggering an open file dialog to work around missing access when necessary. Most users will end up granting full disk access out of frustration, but that's okay because the agents themselves don't have that access. If possible, make it start out with a read-only full-disk entitlement, because otherwise, using it will be much harder.
• Each agent runs in a separate agent runner process with a stricter sandbox.
• The agent sandbox has an entitlement that grants read-only access to the entire disk (or, if the main host app's sandbox doesn't allow that, to every resource that the main host app has access to), and bans the use of the socket() system call.
• AI agents can request read-write access to specific files or directories by asking the host app. The agent is encouraged to ask for access to an entire directory at once if it needs to write to multiple files in that directory.
• The host app can pass in a security-scoped bookmark/URL to grant permission, but asks the user first unless the URL is part of an explicit list of allowlisted URLs that the user provided before beginning the task. Doing this expands the sandbox to allow writing to that file or to files in that directory. The SSB can be created programmatically or, if the main app also doesn't have access, through showing an Open File dialog.
• One tool provides network access to specific hosts with no POST, all GET parameters filtered, and a low limit on URL length to mitigate exfiltration risk. This tool has an entitlement that allow socket access inside an environment where opening sockets is otherwise banned, and thus can be run directly by AI agents.
• One tool provides broader network access with full upload capabilities. This tool lives outside the sandbox so that the AI agents cannot run it themselves — only ask the main host app to run it for them. Then:
  • The main host app requires the user to give permission to access a single hostname for either a single request (allow once) or a single task (always allow for this task).
  • If the user clicks the "Always allow sending data to example.com" button, the user is asked "Trust example.com for similar request parameters only" or "Trust fully".
  • If the user choose to trust similar request parameters only, then any additional GET parameters must be explicitly allowed each time.
• The main host app passes each AI agent runner a new open socket connected to the AI service's server.
• The AI service's server is configured to provide minimal or no network access from the server side.

This is how you protect privacy in an agentic environment.

I hereby retract everything I just said. The entire post was based on a misunderstanding caused by Slashdot's editors adding a single extra letter.

• Original: "very explicit user action."
• Slashdot: "every explicit user action."

What a difference an 'e' makes. I was imagining every single file access causing a UAC dialog.

Yikes.

Well, no, I don't retract the last paragraph. They should still kick Meta's garbage agent off the platform until Meta can get security right.

The word was *every*. *Every* explicit user action.

Oh, bloody hell. I just got rage-baited by incompetent Slashdot editors.

Good night. I'm done for the day.

If this happens, this thirty-year Mac user will be leaving the platform. Full stop. So will just about everyone else within months to single-digit years.

This approach didn't work with Gatekeeper in Mac OS 7. It didn't work for Windows XP. It won't work for modern Mac OS, either. Here's why: CONSTANT PROMPTING MAKES SECURITY WORSE.

Prompting users over and over again to allow or deny actions makes security WORSE. Period. It means that users are constantly being nagged, and constantly having to decide whether an action is harmful or not. This rapidly (over the course of just minutes) turns into query burnout, and the user just clicks "Allow" for everything. And not only does it fail to meet its objective, but it also causes them to the same for every other dialog, including all of the other things Apple put in place to improve privacy and security. And now people are granting every app whatever access it asks for automatically without question, and every advantage that Apple has security-wise and privacy-wise evaporates instantaneously.

Continuous prompting NEVER makes security better. It ONLY makes security worse.

AND this would have a hopelessly deleterious effect on EVERYTHING that high-end users do, from running commands in Terminal (which would become completely unusable) to third-party backups, etc.

And that latter one would also be a major antitrust problem for Apple, which is to say that if they do this, they WILL get sued, and they WILL lose, because it is so clearly open-and-shut that this is not the correct solution for the problem, but that Apple stands to greatly benefit while their competitors are irreparably harmed.

What's described here would completely break the platform at a level that makes it a toy, no more useful than iOS, and completely unreasonable to use for any serious professional work, whether as a software engineer or a graphic designer. And it is pathetically absurd that they think this is a good idea. It makes me assume that none of the Apple security engineers I know are still around, because all of them would have flat out called you a moron for even suggesting something like this. They actually understood security at a more-than-superficial level. Someone proposing this "solution" clearly does not.

You can't fix sh**ty apps by making the platform objectively worse or making things that people legitimately need to do as painful as possible. The only way to fix sh**ty apps is by banning them from the App Store and flagging direct downloads as malware repeatedly until such time as they get their security model right. There are correct ways to sandbox things like agentic frameworks. This is about as far from the right way as you can get, as it does nothing to improve the security of the agentic setup, while catastrophically breaking overall platform usability and turning users into mindless "Allow" clickers.

Find another way. Kick Meta's horrific agentic tool off the platform until they can get security right.

Censorship means suppression of speech or expression by a governing authority. It can be prior restraint (blocking publication) or censorship after the fact (take-downs, bans, etc.).

In the strictest sense, you could maybe argue that soft moderation in the Slashdot style where people who want to see what has been moderated down doesn't qualify as censorship because there's a way around it, but the net impact is still that most of the potential audience doesn't see it, so that argument is on somewhat shaky ground.

At best, you can argue that moderation is not prior restraint censorship, but while prior restraint makes censorship way more likely to be a first amendment issue if the government is involved, it's not a requirement for something being censorship.

What do AI companies have to do with anything? The prompts would be generated by the company running the site, not the AI company. The quality of performance depends on the quality of the prompt and what data it has access to far more than on the model training.