logoalt Hacker News

ActorNightlytoday at 6:36 PM3 repliesview on HN

Apple OS will bypass any user space firewall.

You can verify this yourself. Get an old laptop to act as a wifi hotspot and forward traffic over usb ethernet adapter to your actual router. Then run tcpdump on the computer. You will see the multitude of phone-home traffic.


Replies

throwaway27448today at 7:09 PM

Is there evidence of this anywhere on the internet? I couldn't find anything with ten minutes of searching, and I don't use little snitch, and I'm not going to put the effort in to remediate this just to figure out if this comment has weight.

show 1 reply
arcanemachinertoday at 6:54 PM

Non-macOS user here. Does macOS not let you run things as root?

show 1 reply
wartywhoa23today at 7:28 PM

Well, I block all connections to iCloud for every app (user and system) completely with Little Snitch, and the fact that it does indeed break some little features I can absolutely live without, indicates that it has at least some effect.

But still, I fully share the sentiment that creators of an OS are perfectly capable of bypassing whatever there is running on top of it.