Last Week on My Mac: Nelson’s blind eye, lost property and macOS

If there are two skills that humans excel at, they’re ignoring and forgetting. If you’ve done neither, then I know you’re just an AI.

When Admiral Nelson was signalled to disengage during the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, he raised his telescope to his blind eye and said that he didn’t see the flags giving that order. He pressed on against the instructions of his commander, Admiral Hyde Parker, and secured victory for the British fleet, demonstrating our supreme ability to ignore instructions.

Everyone should visit a lost property office, such as that run by London’s transport system. How anyone could leave behind a musical instrument as substantial as a double bass, an empty coffin, or their prosthetic leg only confirms our unrivalled forgetfulness.

Our Macs may be a far cry from bygone naval engagements and possessions lost during city travels, but we still ignore and forget repeatedly when using them.

I must get dozens of notifications every day, and almost every one of them I give a stern ignoring to. Occasionally I take a peek at all those notifications and discover some that I should have paid more attention to. We’re the same when we’re prompted to accept changes we should be more attentive to, and sometimes even when authenticating. The more we’re notified and asked about, the more we come to ignore, one of the great dangers lurking in modern macOS.

As for forgetfulness, one of my weaknesses is not noticing my Magic TrackPad needs recharging until it’s almost too late. For that I used to force myself to check the Bluetooth menu, but I’m currently trying the Batteries widget in the hope that I won’t forget to look at that. Every so often, when a new SilentKnight user opens it for the first time, they realise that for the last year or so their Mac has been running with SIP turned off, or Gatekeeper/XProtect disabled. Some are so forgetful they can’t even remember changing that setting.

The spur to these reflections is the recent spate of forced or unintended upgrades to macOS Sonoma, and Apple’s strategy to get even the most recalcitrant to surrender to the inevitable. The occasional notification is probably the worst of both worlds, in that it’s readily ignored and quickly forgotten, but surprisingly infuriating for those who can’t or definitely won’t upgrade just yet. The error or bug that turned some notifications into forced upgrades made this even worse. Neither is the red badge applied to System Settings in the Dock effective, as it only trains us to ignore it.

Contrast Apple’s enthusiasm to ensure we all upgrade to the current version of macOS with its nonchalance over other security measures such as updates to XProtect and reports from XProtect Remediator’s anti-malware scans.

Apple neither announces its now-frequent updates to XProtect’s malware signatures, nor does it even tell users its current version. Again, through my experience with those using SilentKnight, it’s not unusual for Macs to be weeks or months behind in XProtect versions. Since XProtect Remediator’s scans first went live over the summer of 2022, those have been detecting and removing malware from macOS without ever informing the user that their Mac had malicious software installed. There was also a period of several months in which neither XProtect data nor XProtect Remediator could be successfully updated through a local content caching server.

For many, the best solution has been to run my free SilentKnight, LockRattler or silnite command tool to check that their Mac’s security systems are up to date and running as expected.

Although I have no intention of dropping SilentKnight, it too is prone to our skills of ignoring and forgetting, and I now want to try to address those in a lightweight app that simply tells the user at a glance whether all is up to date and in order, without running any checks for available updates or trying to push anyone where they don’t want to go. A single graphical indicator is all that’s required, whether it’s displayed in the Dock or a widget: green with a tick, yellow with a ? to show something isn’t quite right, or red with a X when there’s a problem.

This is now coming in a companion to SilentKnight (SK) in the form of Skint, meaning penniless, because that’s what it’ll cost (free). I’ll have further details and a first version in the coming days. It will be an app you won’t want to ignore, and simply can’t forget.