[HN Gopher] Apple added an orange dot that's a showstopper for l...
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Apple added an orange dot that's a showstopper for live visuals
Author : radley
Score : 209 points
Date : 2021-12-20 17:31 UTC (5 hours ago)
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| lwansbrough wrote:
| The number of people in this thread not understanding the
| importance of not having any interference in live visuals makes
| me believe this won't be fixed by Apple. Absolutely baffling.
| garyrichardson wrote:
| Can you explain? I have guesses but I don't think I understand.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| Many musicians have giant screens in their live sets, which
| display incredibly detailed visuals. When you're spending
| hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not more) on a live
| setup, it looks really amateurish to have an orange dot in
| the corner of the screen.
|
| Yes, there are workarounds. But artists shouldn't have to
| deal with that when it worked perfectly fine beforehand. In
| addition, the more stuff you add to your setup, the higher
| chance that something will go wrong.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Professionals who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on
| a live setup are not going to be using the internal I/O of
| their Macbook/Mac Pro. They're going to have dedicated
| video output cards that would not be affected by this.
| Those cards are specifically for having 100% control over
| the output.
|
| The right call her for Apple is to allow users to give
| permission to specific apps to disable this but let's not
| start with the idea that pros are outputting directly from
| their computers without the right hardware.
| [deleted]
| munk-a wrote:
| > The right call her for Apple is to allow users to give
| permission to specific apps to disable this but let's not
| start with the idea that pros are outputting directly
| from their computers without the right hardware.
|
| The unfortunate case with a preference is that as soon as
| you enable such a permission folks can force users to
| enable that permission to use their invasive software.
| The orange dot exists because applications have been
| abusing privacy by invasively using audio and visual
| recording to spy on people. The solution to this problem
| isn't very simple and while the orange dot is causing
| headaches the lack of an orange dot also causes
| headaches.
| q-big wrote:
| > The solution to this problem isn't very simple and
| while the orange dot is causing headaches the lack of an
| orange dot also causes headaches.
|
| If both options have a disadvantage, give users a choice
| which of the evils they prefer, for example in the pre-
| boot environment.
|
| P.S. I am of course aware that it is not typical for
| Apple to give users a choice.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| Malware can make this choice for you and you will never
| know about that.
| munk-a wrote:
| As per my comment - the unfortunate truth is that
| offering users a choice means denying users the freedom
| from being creeped on as every app under the sun asks for
| silent microphone access "for design reasons". We've seen
| how ineffective app permissions (that can't be
| selectively restricted by the OS as on Android) have been
| for iOS devices. Apps boot up and demand access to
| contacts, your camera and your microphone and if you
| refuse they quit out.
|
| It can be empowering to users to deny bad choices - since
| it prevents users from being coerced by malicious
| software (i.e. tiktok, facebook, instagram - not like
| virus laden software).
|
| That all said there is some legitimate functionality
| being lost with this decision.
| jcims wrote:
| offering choice ~ denying freedom
|
| empowering ~ deny bad choices
|
| Just my opinion, but these linguistic contortions
| undermine your point.
|
| Providing users with a decision in which there is an
| asymmetry and/or incentives could be setting them up for
| manipulation. But i think there are ways to balance the
| asymmetry vs. just removing the choice. A simple report
| showing which apps were watching/listening along with
| screen time could be useful, for example.
| munk-a wrote:
| I hope this isn't nitpicking but I don't consider those
| linguistic contortions. A minimum wage empowers workers
| to receive an (ideally) living wage while, on the
| surface, restricting them from being able to sell their
| time for ever lower amounts. There are a lot of debates
| as to the efficacy and justifiability of things like a
| minimum wage but it's important to remember that any
| prevailing sense of the linguistic definitions you might
| assume is a local effect. Comparing American vs. European
| definitions of empowerment is a pretty clear
| demonstration of this where in Europe the ability to live
| a good healthy life is paramount and restrictions that
| promote that life style are generally considered
| empowering.
|
| I do think there might be some other solutions but I also
| think the orange dot is, for almost all users, a
| perfectly acceptable solution - visually obvious without
| being obnoxious.
| q-big wrote:
| > but I also think the orange dot is, for almost all
| users, a perfectly acceptable solution - visually obvious
| without being obnoxious.
|
| That is why the user should be given the choice to
| _activate_ it: make it a sensible default choice in the
| respective settings. The experienced users who know what
| they do should be empowered to make a different choice if
| it makes sense for their workflow.
| indymike wrote:
| > They're going to have dedicated video output cards that
| would not be affected by this. Those cards are
| specifically for having 100% control over the output.
|
| Um, no, how about the built in one worked fine, didn't
| require me to buy a very expensive additional piece of
| hardware. This change took away functionality that worked
| before the upgrade?
|
| > let's not start with the idea that pros are outputting
| directly from their computers without the right hardware.
|
| If professional means derives income from work, you would
| be wrong. If pro means works for an organization with
| unlimited budget, you would be right.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| >built in one worked fine
|
| It had the same problem that it still has. The OS can
| place items on the display that you don't want in the
| middle of a presentation/performance. The only thing that
| "worked fine before" is that you were ok with what the OS
| put there because it was rare for that to happen.
|
| >If professional means
|
| It means that a dot in the upper right hand corner makes
| the function "unusable". If that's the case, then a
| professional would not extend/mirror a desktop display.
| They make sure that they control exactly what is being
| displayed and you can't (and have never been able to) do
| that with macOS.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| >Professionals who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars
| on a live setup are not going to be using the internal
| I/O of their Macbook/Mac Pro. They're going to have
| dedicated video output cards that would not be affected
| by this. Those cards are specifically for having 100%
| control over the output.
|
| Have you ever worked in this industry? Because yes they
| absolutely are.
|
| The people building the video walls (renting them), and
| the people actually running the visuals are not the same
| people.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Yes. I currently work in this industry.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| And you've never met a VJ with an old macbook pro?
| Groxx wrote:
| You meet professionals not taking professional
| precautions in every field. It doesn't mean they're in
| the right, it means they're playing fast and loose and
| hoping common stuff doesn't bite them and their clients.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Of course I have. A VJ with an old Macbook Pro isn't
| someone for whom this dot makes the display "unusable".
| If it did, then they wouldn't be using it because they
| could also have notifications, OS alerts, security
| prompts, or anything else that shows up on a display come
| up during their performance.
| nathancahill wrote:
| Reminds me of this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfUeUCErCmQ
| myself248 wrote:
| Airplane mode nearly prevents almost all the triggers
| that would cause such things to pop up. I thought this
| was standard VJ advice; turn on airplane mode before a
| performance.
|
| Doesn't fix the orange dot, but it helps pretty much
| everything else.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| >helps pretty much everything else
|
| Helps but doesn't solve. There is nothing that you can do
| to remove the OS's ability to put things on a secondary
| display outside of your control. The only option is to
| have a separate I/O controller.
| radley wrote:
| > because they could also have notifications, OS alerts,
| security prompts
|
| Most will be using HDMI out as a second screen, so those
| won't show up
|
| > Yes. I currently work in this industry
|
| What do you use for video output? I'm a hobbyist and used
| iPad & TouchViz with HDMI plug. I just picked up Resolume
| and planned to use a Mac Mini M1 w/ Monterey and HDMI
| out. I'm livestreaming, so I'm only doing 1080.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Do Not Disturb/Focus is a thing.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Not the same thing. Focus doesn't prevent the OS from
| generating windows or alerts on top of your display
| content.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| You're not typically cloning your main screen but rather
| outputting to a second display (that doesn't have the
| focus). It would be very weird indeed for a notification
| to wind up on that display.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Weird but not impossible. The whole point here is that
| professionals who can't take that chance have always had
| to use a hardware I/O device because there is no other
| option.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Perhaps professionals with a lot of money riding on it,
| sure. But for prosumers, the status quo was good enough
| that breaking it cannot be justified by "oh it wasn't
| perfect so who cares?"
| dkonofalski wrote:
| That wasn't the status quo. The OS has always been able
| to display things on top of full-screen apps and apps
| cannot change that.
| honkdaddy wrote:
| There's a _massive_ difference between an unremovable and
| highly visible orange dot and the small chance that
| "notifications, OS alerts, security prompts etc." could
| pop up. I think it's undeniable that there's a contingent
| of people who play live video who will be negatively
| affected by this change and I'm surprised so many in this
| thread are implying that if they don't own a playback
| card, their experience doesn't matter.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| No one is saying their experience doesn't matter. Stop
| arguing straw men. All anyone is saying is that, if
| having the ability to control the output that's going to
| a display outside of the OS is a necessity, then you need
| a hardware controller. That has always been the case. The
| OS can always interfere with a full-screen app on a
| secondary display. The only reason there's any issue now
| is that these people disagree with _this specific feature
| of the OS_. It 's not "unremovable". Just turn off
| whatever recording device is active and it'll go away. If
| you're a bit more tech savvy, turn off SIP and change it
| yourself or go to github and built the utility that
| already exists to get rid of it.
|
| All anyone in this thread is implying is that, if this is
| important to you, you need to have the hardware to do it.
| If Microsoft tomorrow decided to put a Windows logo in
| the corner of the screen just to say "fuck you", you
| would still be unaffected with a hardware I/O device.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I think you underestimate how many places do use the
| internal I/O. My tiny church has a single iMac doing both
| recording and running slides. Small concert venues aren't
| much better.
|
| Some of the conventions I've gone to ran everything in a
| room off a single laptop. (I've set up such things.)
|
| Concerts aren't much better. Only the largest events and
| venues have the kinds of "professional" setups you're
| thinking of.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| This isn't going to matter to a tiny church. A decklink
| is less than $300, and that's if you splurge. A church
| can get one for like $60.
|
| Again, we're talking about "professionals" vs., at best,
| prosumers and consumers. Those applications are not
| unusable because of a small dot.
| rurp wrote:
| I really don't understand why you are being so dismissive
| of many users, just because they don't meet your personal
| definition of "professional". This change makes some use
| cases objectively worse, and telling thousands of people
| to spend hundreds of dollars plus some amount of time to
| mitigate a change they didn't ask for is not a respectful
| position, IMO.
|
| I think this change would be fine as a default, but it
| should be configurable by the end user.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Wow, this is one of the most misinformed takes I've seen
| in a while. I know a number of performers who use a
| Macbook for their visuals, and they _absolutely_ just
| plug their machines into whatever I /O is available at
| their venue. I don't know where you're getting this idea
| that everyone just lugs around a rackmount AV machine,
| and if they don't they're not truly a "professional".
| dkonofalski wrote:
| We're not talking about a rackmount AV machine. We're
| talking about a tiny device that can output to HDMI.
|
| And, again, we _are_ talking about situations where this
| orange dot would make the function "unusable". Those
| situations are not situations where a professional uses
| the built-in I/O and leaves things to chance.
| barneygale wrote:
| My friend has VJ'd large clubs and music festivals on her
| ancient Macbook without ever using an external display
| driver.
|
| There's not a lot of money in the scene for most people.
| They use the software/hardware they have. Hiding
| notifications and colourful dots from the OS shouldn't
| really be an issue.
| palimpsests wrote:
| there's quite a few people here replying to you letting
| you know how there are indeed situations where A/V
| professionals have and are continuing to use built-in
| I/O. I have seen the same. A properly prepared machine is
| immune to the issues I've heard you describe in this
| thread (notifications, etc).
|
| It sounds like there's something about all of these
| responses that isn't resonating with you because I see a
| pattern of responding and letting us know our experiences
| are essentially invalid, for some reason. Are you able to
| speak to why that's important to you? Why does this seem
| so far-fetched / unbelievable to you?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Yeah, I'm watching this unfold and I don't see how the
| other person can't see the problem.
|
| Someone spends a thousand, or two thousand dollars on a
| high-end device with state-of-the-art ports and graphics
| and processing, and because "OS notifications sometimes
| pop up if you don't disable them", real pros buy a piece
| of middleware hardware that does nothing but filter out a
| software issue?
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Yes, exactly. If you need to be able to control what goes
| to the display and take that away from the OS, you need a
| hardware I/O device.
|
| OS notifications and alerts are just examples of any
| number of things that could be displayed that are
| unwanted. In situations where something like that makes
| the setup "unusable", you have to have a hardware I/O
| device. There's not another option.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| I think you're misreading what I'm saying. I have only
| been responding to people that are saying that the dot
| makes this setup "unusable". The machine you're
| describing is not possible without a dedicated hardware
| I/O device because the OS _always_ has access to display
| devices and apps cannot override that.
|
| If the dot makes their setup unusable, then the situation
| prior to Monterey should also have made their setup
| unusable because the OS could have popped up an alert
| dialog at any time (or any kind of OS chrome). Using
| built-in I/O is absolutely fine in professional settings
| but not for settings where you need complete control of
| what's being displayed and that's precisely what they're
| complaining about. They _never_ had completely control of
| what was being displayed. They were just OK with it
| because it either didn 't bother them often or it wasn't
| a dealbreaker for whatever they were doing. If you need
| to know that you're only going to see what you want to
| see, you have to use hardware I/O.
|
| I've never said anyone's experiences are invalid. Stop
| talking down to me like a child and making things up.
| gwd wrote:
| > _I have only been responding to people that are saying
| that the dot makes this setup "unusable". The machine
| you're describing is not possible without a dedicated
| hardware I/O device because the OS always has access to
| display devices and apps cannot override that._
|
| This seems to be the crux of the disagreement in this
| thread. You're equating the effect of two quite different
| things:
|
| 1. A pop-up that's quite intrusive / potentially
| embarassing, but has (say) a 1/100 chance of happening
| any given show, and in any case would only be there for a
| few seconds; the rest of the show would be unaffected
|
| 2. A small but intentionally noticeable orange dot that's
| there 100% of the show for every show
|
| Yes, if you want to be a top level professional, then you
| can afford to have neither. But I can certainly imagine
| people / venues where #1 would be considered a normal
| cost of doing business, but #2 would not.
|
| That said, if fixing them both is as easy and inexpensive
| as people in this thread seem to think, then the small
| "nudge" by #2 to get them to fix #1 is probably
| beneficial for the ecosystem overall.
| umanwizard wrote:
| The point you're not addressing is that in practice,
| before this change, people usually had close enough to
| full control, except for maybe a <1% chance of something
| going wrong. The OS can, in principle, do anything, but
| in reality it usually doesn't. Whereas with this new
| orange dot, there is a 100% chance of it being there.
|
| It's easy to imagine a pretty wide range of people for
| whom a tiny theoretical risk of the OS going crazy and
| showing some kind of notification even with notifications
| disabled is acceptable, but an orange dot that's 100%
| deterministically guaranteed to be there isn't.
| ratww wrote:
| _> Professionals who spend hundreds of thousands of
| dollars on a live setup are not going to be using the
| internal I /O of their Macbook/Mac Pro_
|
| Why not? The internal I/O is pretty good! Except for this
| issue, obviously.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Because professionals can't take the chance that an in-
| app notification (from another app) or a menu bar or
| something else will end up in their output. We're not
| just talking about an external monitor here.
| ratww wrote:
| This is not really an issue with a machine prepared for
| live performances or presentations. Until now.
|
| Portability is essential for some people, and MacBooks
| have pretty reliable IO.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Yes it is. Notifications can pop-up if someone forgets to
| disable them. Any OS prompts can pop-up on the display.
| You don't leave those types of things to chance.
| ratww wrote:
| The "prepared" in my post implies that notifications are
| disabled.
|
| Also notifications won't really be an issue for anyone
| but people using the machine both for personal and
| professional stuff. In the worse case, you can have
| different user accounts. A professional machine used for
| VJing or even audio recording will have zero
| notifications.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| You can afford a separate laptop for VJing, but don't
| want to spend $200 to get 100% protection from unexpected
| notifications, error messages, calls, and orange dot?
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Ok, but OS prompts will. If something crashes, you're
| going to get a notification on-screen if you're not using
| dedicate I/O hardware.
| ratww wrote:
| Not a problem in practice. On macOS, OS crashes show up
| on the first monitor, and so do other crash alerts. Also,
| again, if this is not an amateur thing, the only programs
| that will be running will be those directly related to
| the presentation.
|
| Also I wonder if we're talking about different scales
| here. I'm not talking about the 150 inch monitor, I'm
| talking about video art, VJing, and small scale stuff.
| macOS works fine for those things.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Not necessarily. It shows up on whatever the active
| monitor is.
| ratww wrote:
| But the "current" monitor is the one with the GUI and the
| mouse cursor. The secondary monitor is the one being used
| for external video. There are even dedicated APIs for it.
|
| Are you a macOS user? Your other examples talk about
| Windows Update... the situation in macOS is a bit
| different, which is a lot of people doing audio/video
| flock to it. Not everyone needs external hardware, just a
| MacBook can do a lot.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| >Are you a macOS user?
|
| Yes. macOS is my daily driver and I'm on Monterey.
|
| All I'm saying is that, if anyone wants to say that this
| dot makes their use case unusable, then they have to
| admit that the current OS setup was always unusable for
| them because the OS was always able to display chrome on
| their displays. It may not have happened often or even in
| a way that they thought was "unusable" but it was able to
| happen. The only difference here is that they're not
| happy with the type of OS-level things that are
| displayed.
|
| In my experience, people for whom any kind of errant
| display items matter use dedicated hardware devices for
| their I/O. If it didn't matter before because it was only
| windows/alerts/notifications/whatever, then that clearly
| doesn't make it "unusable" just "not preferred". I fully
| agree that there needs to be some kind of option for this
| on presentation displays but the people saying that SNL
| wouldn't have dedicated hardware for their displays is
| asinine.
| ratww wrote:
| Sure, in theory you are correct. We should seek the more
| reliable solution. In practice, this is not really a
| problem for anyone using macOS for small time
| visuals/performance/presentations, as long as you keep
| your computer well prepared for those situations. It
| works 99.9% of the time, which is 100% for most people
| (even pros) doing it sporadically. Maybe your solution
| covers a few more 9s, and you need those 9s (I know live
| broadcasting does), but this is unnecessary for most
| common folk, and you're dismissing this use case across
| this thread, which is why I'm answering to you.
|
| I feel like the notifications issue you mention is bit of
| a red herring, because having too many things running in
| the background _will_ cause problems regardless of using
| external gear, regardless of them showing on the screen
| or not. You can 't rely on external gear alone for
| stability, the computer itself has to be stable. And the
| computer alone being stable is enough for 90% of people.
| And even if there are notifications... so what? This is
| people doing it for art purposes, on parties. They learn
| a lesson and never have to care again.
|
| If those people are really using Steam on their computers
| (like you said on another comment), they surely aren't
| pros worried about performance, reliability, or anything
| of the sort that warrants a dedicated playback card.
|
| Surely the default I/O is nowhere near enough for SNL or
| even for local broadcast, but it is good enough for a
| large contingent of people that don't need the same
| reliability that you or SNL needs. And it _does_ works
| for them in practice, without notifications, and without
| OS chrome... except for the new orange dot, which _is_ a
| nuisance.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Well, this is a "no true Scotsman" fallacy. In practice
| they do. It's not frequent but I've seen that a few times
| and it it's always "fun" to watch.
|
| So it shows that there's a lot of professionals out there
| not following best practices (which isn't surprising to
| be honest, it's the case in every industry, including
| super critical ones...).
|
| Maybe the orange dot will actually help these people
| start using best practices in the end... (note that I'm
| not defending Apple's move when saying so, I really hate
| their tendency to think there customers are wrong and
| because they are Apple they know better)
| dkonofalski wrote:
| It's not a "No True Scotsman" because I'm using their
| definition of "Scottsman". If someone wants to be able to
| have full control of what goes on the display, outside of
| the OS, then they _have_ to have a hardware I /O
| controller on a Mac. Their only argument is that they
| were OK with what the OS was putting on there because it
| didn't affect their specific use case. It's only an issue
| because they don't like what the OS is doing now. It's
| great if people got lucky in the past and never ran into
| an OS prompt or an alert from an app (looking at you,
| Steam) but that doesn't change the fact that the
| situation is currently the same as it was before
| Monterey. Anyone who's saying that a dot in the corner
| makes it "unusable" has to admit that anything else would
| have also made it unusable yet they chose to continue
| without managing the I/O of the device and didn't care.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| You're all over this thread trying to gaslight people
| into believing a constant dot is somehow the same a rare
| chance at an OS notification that you forgot to disable.
| People plug there mac directly into shit and that worked
| fine; now it doesn't end of story.
| ratww wrote:
| _> looking at you, Steam_
|
| I really don't believe anyone running Steam on their
| video computer is worried enough or even serious about
| reliability to use a dedicated video playback card. Sure
| it would be nice if everyone used a dedicated card, but
| it's 100x more important that those people stop running
| Steam... unless maybe if they're pro game streamers or
| something.
|
| Also, even Steam requires extra permissions on Mac to
| display the overlays you mention.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| >But artists shouldn't have to deal with that when it
| worked perfectly fine beforehand.
|
| It didn't work perfectly fine beforehand, though. They just
| didn't care about how it worked before. Now, suddenly, they
| do.
| baxuz wrote:
| I don't get what's so bad about an orange dot in the menu
| bar? Hopefully they are running the presentation in
| fullscreen mode anyway?
| tedunangst wrote:
| I think people are struggling to reconcile "spend $100k on a
| presentation setup" and "can't afford $200 output card".
| tetha wrote:
| But is that actually different from trying to get any budget
| for e.g. IT security software, redundancy, backups or any
| kind of nonfunctional investment in an IT network -
| especially in smaller shops? Putting up my ignorant penny-
| pincher hat, I cannot see a difference between a hardware
| output card and an HDMI cable in a laptop, at least until
| apple put an orange dot there. So let's rather buy more
| flyers.
|
| I'm very much not surprised at saving the wrong pennies.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| While other people are struggling with "it's fine when Apple
| forces us to jump through a bunch of undocumented hacks and
| workarounds to keep doing what we bought the machine for"
| labcomputer wrote:
| And still others are struggling with, "How do you not
| understand that Apple is trying to balance the trade-offs
| between 'allow an app to do anything' and 'protect users
| from malicious software'?"
|
| I think they could do a better job (e.g., a simple setting
| in System Preferences that turns off recording
| notifications), but to pretend that they're doing this for
| no reason at all or that the orange dot is a show-stopper
| for _a significant fraction of_ their user-base is just not
| making an argument in good faith.
| munk-a wrote:
| There still exists the classic solution of offsetting video
| output through a projector (or on a monitor using vertical
| alignment) to place the dot offscreen right? If we're talking
| about people dropping tens of thousands of dollars on equipment
| that feels like a modestly acceptable short term solution.
| phnofive wrote:
| I didn't understand the importance and came to this thread to
| learn. Please don't assume a lack of prior knowledge reflects
| an ongoing lack of curiosity.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Learning is perfectly fine. But there are people here who
| have it explicitly explained to them, and continue on with
| the "so what? It's just an orange dot" line of thinking.
| AstroDogCatcher wrote:
| Suggesting the explanation provided is insufficiently
| clear, no?
| jaywalk wrote:
| Looking through the comments, I can't imagine how else it
| could possibly be explained or clarified further. For
| this use case, it is assumed that the software producing
| the visuals has full control over the output. An orange
| dot that cannot be removed means that the software does
| not have full control over the output, which is
| unacceptable. It's that simple.
| nightpool wrote:
| From a sibling thread: EDIT: As far as
| I know, the best long-term answer here is for apps that
| present visuals full screen to "capture" the external
| display for exclusive use using an API (https://developer
| .apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/14562...), but
| that's not super common right now.
|
| Sounds like it's totally possible for the software to
| have full control over the output if it wants to, this
| only affects software that runs in a "standard"
| fullscreen mode without explicitly taking full control
| over the output.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Hence making every existing live visual software
| available on the mac redundant, unless the update and
| make this change.
|
| It's not a complicated situation to grasp and it is
| seriously significant.
| gjs278 wrote:
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| It is not just an orange dot for me. It's a very important
| orange dot and I'm very thankful for this dot.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I would hope (guess?) that Apple uses other sources of
| information when trying to cater to the creative
| professionals.
|
| (I'm assuming Apple still makes an effort for this segment,
| but I really have no idea how they do things these days.)
| zenexer wrote:
| If I'm forced to choose between live entertainment and a great
| privacy feature like this one, the privacy feature is going to
| win. Artists will get creative and find workarounds; other
| companies will fill the gap, and other commenters have pointed
| out cheap hardware that solves this problem.
| ratww wrote:
| Apple is absolutely not forced to choose. They can provide a
| way to override it. Considering how much they love to boast
| about this market, I'm pretty sure they'll change it.
| jaywalk wrote:
| You're clearly not involved in live entertainment, so you're
| not making that choice. It's also a false choice, because
| Apple could easily preserve privacy while also making their
| hardware usable for live entertainment again. Just a couple
| ideas off the top of my head would be to allow the user to
| choose which display(s) have the indicator (defaulting to all
| displays, of course) or adding an additional permission level
| for applications that are already approved for audio input to
| not show the indicator.
|
| It doesn't have to be an all or nothing situation if Apple is
| even remotely interested in addressing this use case, which
| they should be.
| labcomputer wrote:
| > if Apple is even remotely interested in addressing this
| use case, which they should be.
|
| I think the reality is that the set of people who want the
| feature and who would use it in a live professional
| environment with expensive hardware _and_ who can 't afford
| a $100 dongle from BlackMagic is so close to the null set
| that Apple is unlikely to care.
|
| For goodness sake, _Apple 's own_ HDMI dongle costs $70.
| Just spend $30 more and buy the BM one instead.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Shouldn't these things be in hardware? Like I know that macbooks
| have a green LED next to the camera if they are recording.
|
| I'm sure there's a way to hack the screen to make the orange dot
| disappear. At the least you can intercept the output buffer.
| nojito wrote:
| How would you disable this without compromising security/privacy?
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Add another checkbox next to each app in Preferences ->
| Security & Privacy -> Privacy -> Microphone (and camera) that
| allows the app to bypass the indicator. Users would have to go
| to this pref pane and enable that checkbox themselves (with
| instructions from the app, probably).
| kevincox wrote:
| In addition to allowing the users to remove specific
| applications from the dot you could let the user decide which
| displays the dot appears on.
| capableweb wrote:
| You allow the user to keep a whitelist of apps they already
| knew will be using the microphone/line-in/whatever audio source
| and when those apps use any audio source, don't display the
| orange dot.
| fouric wrote:
| The article addresses this:
|
| > And it does seem there could be a fix here; you already have
| to give applications permission to access your mic and camera,
| and it seems there should be some way for an app to disable the
| orange dot once its permissions are elevated with opt-in by the
| user.
|
| MacOS already has security mechanisms meant to prevent malware
| from e.g. installing a rootkit into the kernel, or reading
| keychain passwords - one of those mechanisms could be used to
| prevent programs from altering whatever setting controls "show
| orange notification dot" (which, in a sane design, would be
| opt-out - or, opt-in to "disable orange notification dot) on
| their own.
| nojito wrote:
| How does that prevent malicious grants of permission?
|
| This was a problem with webcams before the light was
| hardcoded to the power supply.
| fouric wrote:
| Hmmm, can you clarify what you mean by "malicious grants of
| permission"? Do you mean when a piece of software (malware,
| in this case) tells the OS to give it permission to hide
| the dot, when the user hasn't consented?
|
| If that's the definition you're using - MacOS already
| guards against that, simply because the orange dot is
| already being implemented in software in a way that is
| difficult/impossible for ordinary programs to change (but
| is controllable by the OS). And, from what I understand,
| MacOS already has many settings that are OS-controlled -
| you can't do certain things without authenticating yourself
| to the OS, and neither can software on your behalf.
|
| If that's not quite right, I'll have to ask you to
| elaborate on what scenario you're thinking of.
| togaen wrote:
| I don't understand what the problem is. Why does it matter
| whether a little orange dot is there or not.
| [deleted]
| jaywalk wrote:
| The orange dot will appear on the live output, which is fed to
| an LED video wall/projector/etc. on or near a stage. Completely
| unacceptable, and makes Macs entirely useless for live visuals.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Completely unacceptable
|
| But.... why? Why would a little orange dot offend anyone?
| the_fury wrote:
| Because if I had wanted a little orange dot to be shown to
| everyone during my performance, I would have put it there.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Because it's not part of the visuals, which should be the
| only thing on the output. Maybe it's because I've actually
| run systems for this exact purpose, but I'm kind of
| surprised at how difficult this seems to be for some to
| grasp.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| But I don't understand why they're mirroring their
| _desktop_ to some kind of visual display system? Wouldn
| 't they be using something like a DeckLink for this use-
| case?
|
| Monitor outputs are for monitors - if you want an
| application-specific video output you can get that and it
| won't be a desktop so it won't have this problem.
|
| If you mirror your desktop then yeah... you get whatever
| desktop UI chrome is on your desktop.
| jaywalk wrote:
| They're not mirroring their desktop. It's a secondary
| display running a full screen application.
|
| That's just how this stuff works. Sure, you could use
| something like a DeckLink, but the vast majority of
| things like this just use a monitor output.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Because most of these displays look like monitors to your
| system. Using the existing rendering pipelines to a full
| screen monitor is far easier, and less expensive then
| custom hardware just to move pixels that the built in
| graphics card is more than capable of
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Ok so it's a quick hack for video output but they're
| going to run into problems like this. And for example any
| notifications, system updates, Launchpad, whatever, would
| also appear. That's how you end up with goofy things like
| a sign with a Windows 'need to update now' message. If
| they were doing it properly with a production video
| output they wouldn't have this problem.
| jaywalk wrote:
| You can call it a "quick hack" if you'd like, but I can
| assure you that all of the potential pitfalls you mention
| are taken into account by the people who setup and run
| these systems.
|
| You're not going to "gotcha!" people who have actually
| done this stuff.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Thank you! It's crazy to me that anyone that would
| consider themselves a professional would mirror their
| desktop for the use cases these people claim to be using.
| "Mariah Carey playing in front of millions on NYE"? Gimme
| a break. No one is mirroring the desktop from their
| Macbook for that performance.
| ratww wrote:
| Nobody is mirroring their desktop...
| egypturnash wrote:
| Artists expect a blank canvas, with nothing there they have
| not put there.
| quadrangle wrote:
| You seem to be confusing two things (well, really just you're
| being hyperbolic):
|
| TRUE: the dot BEING THERE is useless (and undesireable and
| bad)
|
| FALSE: the dot makes Macs useless for live visuals
|
| Just because something is 100% bad design, bothersome, 100%
| negative, and should never have been allowed to happen, does
| NOT mean it destroys a product entirely.
|
| When Mini Coopers were made with the stupidest turn signals
| ever (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28661282) that
| doesn't make the car undrivable even though there's
| ABSOLUTELY no defense of the design.
| jaywalk wrote:
| The dot absolutely makes Macs useless for live visuals.
| Nobody worth a damn would _ever_ use a system that required
| an orange dot to appear on the live output.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| So don't update until it's fixed, I don't see the huge
| issue. You wouldn't update your pro live visual system on
| the day of release right?
| quadrangle wrote:
| You can use them for live visuals. You WON'T (and I don't
| blame you), but you CAN. "Absolutely useless" obviously
| is _intended_ to be "I'm super mad about this" rather
| than literally true.
| nullandvoid wrote:
| You're picking a really odd hill to die on. Is it that
| hard to imagine that having random imagery (orange dot)
| showing on your live work (which a client has paid $$$
| for) is a complete no-go for professionals (if you ever
| want to get hired again)?
| quadrangle wrote:
| Just mildly objecting to the strength of someone's
| hyperbole is life-threatening?
|
| Just because other people are feeling super aggravated
| about this completely stupid design decision by Apple
| doesn't mean it's valid to project that on me as if I'm
| fighting some battle.
|
| I don't really care about this. I get it, people are
| upset about a totally indefensible, short-sighted design
| that impacts people's ability to use Macs to do
| presentations that will be accepted in professional
| contexts.
|
| Yes, there's some sense to the hyperbole that says
| something is "useless" when reality is "this will not be
| accepted in my field of work". It's still hyperbole.
| Admitting that it's hyperbole doesn't mean accepting the
| bad design.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| You're just making a semantic quibble. What if the screen
| was half taken up by goatse and the other half what you
| wanted to display? Surely you CAN still use it for live
| video. But you can't.
| quadrangle wrote:
| The quibble is people saying something similar to "this
| orange dot is as bad as having half the screen taken up
| by goatse!" and then when someone else says "it's not
| actually that bad though, right?" they say "it IS THAT
| BAD!!" And I'm like, "I get that you're mad, but it's
| really not actually as bad as you're saying". That's not
| a semantics debate.
| recursive wrote:
| I'll take a stab at this.
|
| This is like when you crash a car. Insurance company
| considers it "totalled". But you can still drive it. The
| cost of fixing the car is more than the value of the car.
|
| In this case, the negative effect of the orange dot
| outweighs all utility of the product for the use case. So
| it's useless in the sense that it's "worse than nothing"
| by some metric. It's useless in the same way that a
| shopping cart is useless for commuting to work. I mean,
| TECHNICALLY, you could commute to work in a shopping
| cart. But it would be worse than just not using it.
| quadrangle wrote:
| I think that's the point that people are objecting to.
|
| The orange dot doesn't _total_ the presentation the way a
| totalled-car in a crash does, certainly not necessarily.
| It 's NOT worse than nothing. It's not like a shopping
| cart for commuting to work.
|
| The point of the replies here overall is that those
| things are hyperbole. It's NOT about nit-picking the
| language. It's "well, _technically_ , the car will still
| drive in this case", it's saying that the orange dot DOES
| NOT ruin presentations _that_ badly. You can ACTUALLY and
| PRACTICALLY present with the orange dot.
|
| A better analogy: your nice car gets a rock through a
| window with a noticeable hole and huge cosmetic crack.
| You say "I can't drive this now! My car is useless! It's
| totalled!" And people are like "Dude, it's not totalled."
| And you say, "This is my professional car for business, I
| can't show up with a cracked window!" and People are
| like, "well, you could actually..."
|
| It's not like the software has a bug that inverts all the
| colors, and people are saying "you could in fact do an
| inverted-color presentation, it's _possible_ ". It's JUST
| a little dot, and it's bad, but it's NOT as bad as the
| hyperbole.
| recursive wrote:
| For some, it's not that bad. For some it is.
|
| I'll take you at your word that it's not that bad for
| you. I'll take someone else at their word that it _is_
| that bad for them. It probably depends a lot on the
| context.
| quadrangle wrote:
| If a car with a shattered window is _completely_
| unacceptable for some situation for some reason, a person
| could say (still hyperbolically), "it might as well be
| totalled". It's still stupid to say "it's totalled!" (and
| that's not because I'm objecting to the insurance
| definition).
|
| The orange dot being unacceptable to some people and
| situations is never something I've doubted in the
| slightest.
|
| Some people can't seem to grasp that it's perfectly
| consistent to say "you're being hyperbolic, but your
| objection is fully sound". It's as though after a crash
| that results in a shattered window, someone says "it's
| totalled!" and then if someone else says "it's NOT
| totalled" they take that to mean that a shattered window
| is no real problem.
|
| The orange dot is totally stupid, unacceptable in many
| situations, the decision was atrocious, AND the language
| people have been using about it is hyperbolic.
| buildbuildbuild wrote:
| My temporary fix has been to use an expensive hardware scaler
| to crop the output when I run into this. You'd think Apple
| would have plenty of production experts beta testing, I'm
| sure this will eventually affect their own live events.
|
| Mic input is very useful for receiving timecode to keep
| production gear in sync.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Yeah, I considered that when I was reading the article. If
| your content can still look alright being scaled, that'll
| work. There is definitely some content that won't be quite
| so forgiving, though.
| buildbuildbuild wrote:
| You're right. To clarify I'm blacking out the top X
| pixels to hide the dot, not scaling.
| modeless wrote:
| There's a built in accessibility zoom feature in macos, can
| it also crop out the dot?
| dangrossman wrote:
| Did you read the article?
|
| "In our particular case, this means that this orange dot
| appears on the stage output, which is totally unacceptable for
| anyone using macOS as a professional video tool that sends
| video output to a video projector."
|
| Imagine an orange dot appearing on top of every video billboard
| in Times Square.
| bryan0 wrote:
| I'm sure Parent read the article, but the question is why is
| this a big deal? For someone not in the live visual space,
| it's not immediately clear that an orange dot in the corner
| is "totally unacceptable".
|
| > Imagine an orange dot appearing on top of every video
| billboard in Times Square.
|
| I don't think I would notice or care?
| Accacin wrote:
| It's their laptop, they are aware that something is
| capturing their audio input, and they don't want to be
| reminded of that in this particular instance.
|
| Frankly, it doesn't matter if you would notice or care.
| dangrossman wrote:
| > I don't think I would notice or care?
|
| Do you think none of the advertisers, or billboard owners,
| would notice or care?
|
| Those are the clients paying the people that read this site
| to create and run their live visuals.
|
| A 5 foot diameter orange dot on top of their ad is not what
| they signed off on. There is money at stake.
|
| Whether you care or not isn't relevant.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| As a New Yorker, I'd love to have that sort of visual
| feedback on the surveillance of Times Square, a public
| space. And whether I care is quite relevant.
| dangrossman wrote:
| Live visuals aren't making a recording, they're reacting
| to sound inputs in realtime. That's not surveillance.
|
| Times Square is already blanketed in actual surveillance
| unrelated to live visuals on billboards.
|
| https://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/timessquare/
|
| https://worldcams.tv/united-states/new-york/times-square
|
| https://www.mylivestreams.com/webcam/times-square-live-
| strea...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Live visuals aren 't making a recording, they're
| reacting to sound inputs in realtime. That's not
| surveillance._
|
| Potato, potato. If a billboard has a microphone attached,
| it's not unreasonable to put a visual tax on it. (Or the
| economic tax of using dedicated equipment. Nobody is
| running Times Square billboards off a Mac.)
| gumby wrote:
| > Imagine an orange dot appearing on top of every video
| billboard in Times Square.
|
| Seems unlikely that whatever's driving the billboards in time
| square needs to have the mic on...and that a tiny bit of
| postproduction is a burden on the people making said videos.
| dangrossman wrote:
| > Seems unlikely that whatever's driving the billboards in
| time square needs to have the mic on
|
| There have been many interactive billboards in Times
| Square. Some of them are at ground level. The article even
| mentions this use case: "Those applications don't even need
| to be obviously using audio; live visuals often use mic or
| line input to produce sound-reactive animation and the
| like"
|
| > tiny bit of postproduction is a burden on the people
| making said videos.
|
| What postproduction are you referring to? The dot is added
| to the video output by the Mac, not added to the video
| file. You can't edit it out.
| ohCh6zos wrote:
| I think I'd love it if every billboard scooping up audio
| announced it was doing that.
| gbear605 wrote:
| If your billboard is recording me, I want you to add the
| orange light. _Please please please please._
| gumby wrote:
| > "Those applications don't even need to be obviously
| using audio; live visuals often use mic or line input to
| produce sound-reactive animation and the like"
|
| Why would anyone want to suppress a warning to the user
| that they are being surveilled?
| dangrossman wrote:
| I can't make myself take this question seriously.
| labcomputer wrote:
| > What postproduction are you referring to?
|
| Crop a 20 pixel column? Surely we have hardware that can
| do that in real time today...
| quadrangle wrote:
| Gosh, everyone who was about to be convinced to go buy a Big
| Mac will lose their appetite! /s
| [deleted]
| philliphaydon wrote:
| I still don't get it.
|
| 1) Who uses macOS to run a billboard?!?
|
| 2) As far as I can tell the orange dot displays in the menu
| bar? Does it show in the full screen app???
| spicybright wrote:
| 1. Have you never seen a billboard or tv screen
| advertisement break before? 90% of the time it's running
| windows, and you'll see a very zoomed in top left corner of
| the desktop.
|
| It's absolutely not a stretch someone has a mac mini to run
| these.
|
| That said, only a fool would upgrade to bleeding edge
| software in this usecase.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| I've never seen any billboard or electronic advertising
| running on anything running MacOS. The only time I can
| think macs were used for anything other than the creation
| of the content was when we used to put Mac minis into
| broadcasters to deliver the content to. But we put
| windows on them.
| ggenoyam wrote:
| About 10 years ago, I had a job with one of the largest
| outdoor advertising companies in Times Square, running
| several huge LED displays, including one that used a
| camera feed for interactive experiences with the
| audience. I don't know too much about the specifics, but
| at the time I worked there, all of their screens,
| including the one that used a camera for AR stuff, were
| driven by Mac Pro towers running OS X.
|
| So while I can't say if this is still the case or not, in
| 2012 many of the times sq billboards were being driven by
| macs.
| jug wrote:
| Yes, apparently it does show in full screen too.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/693969
|
| Removing it in full screen ought to be the easy fix for
| Apple. By the time you've started the app and are done
| fiddlign with it while setting it up for production use, it
| should no longer be a surprise that it's using the mic.
|
| Also, AFAIK apps don't use to autostart in full screen
| (might even be against design guidelines) so there should
| always be an opportunity to notice any spying in time.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| Wow I can't believe it displays on full screen content.
| :|
| khazhoux wrote:
| I think the context is if you are using Mac to generate visuals
| that get projected on a screen during performances. I guess now
| you wind up with an orange dot in top right corner.
|
| So presumably you'd see a big orange dot in the right-most
| screen here: https://i0.wp.com/www.grimygoods.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2017...
| olyjohn wrote:
| Looks unprofessional IMO if you were watching a live stream,
| and there was a permanent orange dot on your video. People may
| be screen capturing using an external output...
|
| Would it bother you if Star Wars had an orange dot in the
| corner the whole time? People want to make professional videos
| and live streams, and not have a constant reminder that there's
| a Mac somewhere involved in the video... and this has hosed
| people's workflows.
| eropple wrote:
| Because when you are running video out to a 150" LED wall, that
| orange dot is a very large dot. And even were it not, you are
| not building your presentational elements around "having some
| orange dot on screen".
|
| "I mean, jeez. They just left the mouse cursor in the middle of
| the screen, what's the big deal?"
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Anyone outputting to a 150" LED wall will have a hardware I/O
| card that allows them to control the output 100%. This
| doesn't happen in professional settings, only in consumer
| (and _maybe_ prosumer) settings. Professionals don 't leave
| things like that to chance.
| skeletal88 wrote:
| To how many people are you going to tell that their
| concerns aren't valid and their experiences are irrelevant?
| Maybe it's you who is wrong, when so many people are
| telling you about the real world problems and uses that
| this update is going to ruin?
| dave78 wrote:
| I've been involved with several live productions in large
| arenas where there were multiple very large LED screens (48
| feet wide I think) as well as being webcast to a
| significant audience. The A/V budget for these events was 7
| figures. Several semi-trucks full of equipment for A/V. I
| don't know if that's professional or prosumer, but it
| seemed very professional to me.
|
| 100% of the computer graphics at these events came from PCs
| and Macs with their default video output. Some even came
| from the HDMI output on a Raspberry Pi.
|
| I worked a lot with the production companies behind these
| shows and it seemed to be SOP to use a regular Macbook with
| Powerpoint to drive the displays.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Just want to echo this story.
|
| Maybe at the super bowl, or the opening of the olympics,
| or at some major pop stars tour where _everything_ is
| time coded and planned and is the same production every
| night, sure.
|
| But at festivals? Clubs? Whatever NYE party you go to
| this year? No.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| At festivals, clubs, and my own NYE party, a tiny dot in
| the corner is not a dealbreaker and wouldn't make the
| display "unusable". If it did, I would bring a dedicated
| hardware I/O device.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| We go to different festivals, clubs, and parties I think.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Then a small dot in the corner can't possibly be
| considered a use-case where it's "unusable" because using
| the computer with the default I/O in the manner you're
| suggesting means that those people are also ok with
| notifications, OS alerts, and _any other OS chrome_ being
| OK on the screen. You cannot control the display of OS
| functions on the built in I /O via an app.
|
| That being said, I just don't believe you. A 7-figure
| budget with semi trucks full of equipment that couldn't
| afford (or didn't think to afford) a video display device
| is unbelievable if you want to suggest that a small dot
| makes this unusable.
| dave78 wrote:
| > means that those people are also ok with notifications,
| OS alerts, and any other OS chrome being OK on the screen
|
| All of those things can be controlled though, unlike this
| new dot. I've had my personal laptop hooked up to one of
| these huge screens with a live audience of 20,000. Yes,
| you better be careful to close out your messaging and
| Gmail and everything else. But also, since it's running
| as an extended display and the program is running in
| full-screen mode, the OS generally will not show the
| things you mentioned anyway, in my experience.
|
| An orange dot would not have been tolerated in this
| environment. "Unusable" may not be the right word, but
| the people who set up these kinds of things are very
| particular about how things look, and so is the client
| who is paying millions of dollars.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| If the client is paying millions of dollars, then the
| production should be using dedicated hardware I/O. You
| saying "the OS generally will not show you things" admits
| that it can and sometimes does show those things and
| those would absolutely not be acceptable in a million
| dollar production gig. That's why we use dedicated
| hardware.
| dave78 wrote:
| I don't understand why you're so combative about this.
| You say "professionals never do this", but lots of people
| are telling you that sometimes they do. Perhaps it's time
| to consider that your experience is not universal?
|
| In the cases I've been involved with, the computers
| generating the displays came from the clients, though the
| production company also used Macs with Powerpoint for
| creating lower-thirds for IMAG. The client-provided
| computers were running a custom software application
| designed for displaying data on a secondary screen. I'm
| not even sure if Decklink can even do that as the
| software just expects to output to a secondary display
| (it does not know anything about Decklink).
|
| Here is a picture of one such event: https://media.beam.u
| snews.com/7e/1e/aecd818e4128ab6759358307...
| dkonofalski wrote:
| I'm not being combative and you're (I'm guessing
| purposely) leaving out parts of my statements to try and
| argue a point I've never made. I know my experience isn't
| universal but, by definition, if people are saying that a
| dot in the corner of the display makes their setup
| "unusable" then their setup has always been unusable
| because the OS has access to put things on their display
| at any time.
|
| If the computers came from the clients, then the clients
| didn't care whether something might pop-up on accident.
| There's literally no way for someone on the production
| side to prevent that with a computer that they don't know
| the ins-and-outs of so it cannot be an issue so that's
| not the type of situation that I'm talking about.
|
| I'm _only_ talking about the people who are saying that
| this dot makes a Macbook "unusable" for the purpose of
| display. That's 100% not true and anyone that needs that
| level of precision, as a professional, uses dedicated I/O
| hardware to keep exactly that from happening.
| dave78 wrote:
| > That's 100% not true
|
| I don't know what else to say. I work with people who put
| on live shows for 20,000+, they use PCs and Macs to drive
| the display WITHOUT Decklink or similar, and they would
| be upset if there was a persistent orange dot on the
| screen. If you want to split hairs about whether or not
| that makes the new macOS "unusable" in these situations,
| then fine, but in the environment I'm familiar with it
| would not be tolerated. They would replace the Mac device
| with a PC which doesn't have this issue because they
| _would_ deem it unusable, even though it can technically
| still display images on a screen.
|
| And despite your repeated comments on this article, it IS
| possible to configure a PC to not show any notifications
| for use in a live show, between a combination of changing
| OS settings, closing unneeded programs, and using the
| fullscreen APIs of the OS. This is something that can be
| done ahead of time and tested. I've written software that
| shows fullscreen on secondary displays on large
| projectors for presentation-like purposes and I have
| never had an OS notification pop up over the fullscreen
| software on a secondary display, even on other people's
| machines where they didn't take care to shut down
| programs and turn off notifications. Other commenters
| here seem to have similar experiences.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| You don't know what else to say and I don't know what
| else to tell you. Those people would also be upset if
| anything else outside of a dot popped up on their
| display, wouldn't they? Or are they just against dots for
| some reason? Hardware I/O devices exist for _precisely_
| this reason. They literally only exist to be able to
| control what gets output _outside of the OS_. Just
| because you personally never had an OS alert or something
| else pop-up doesn 't mean it's not possible or that it
| doesn't happen. It does happen, usually unintentionally.
| That's why we have I/O devices.
| radus wrote:
| Here's what it boils down to:
|
| notifications = low probability
|
| orange dot = 100%
|
| The risk of an embarrassing notification got traded for
| the certainty of the orange dot.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| It's not 100% unless you're using an input to record
| audio and then it's there for a reason. 99% of the people
| in these threads aren't going to see this during their
| PowerPoints because they're not recording anything and
| the 1% that do and care about the dot should be using a
| hardware I/O device anyways because the OS can do a lot
| more than just display a dot. Additionally, applications
| can also fix this themselves by using Apple's APIs.
| labcomputer wrote:
| > I don't understand why you're so combative about this.
| You say "professionals never do this", but lots of people
| are telling you that sometimes they do.
|
| For what its worth, from someone who doesn't work in this
| space, there's something really confusing to me:
|
| This thread is about professionals who:
|
| 1. Are displaying visuals at venues with million dollar
| A/V hardware budgets.
|
| 2. For which an orange dot (or anything other than pixel-
| perfect outputs) is a complete showstopper.
|
| 3. Who can't afford a $100 dongle mentioned upthread to
| output pixel-perfect graphics from their Macs.
|
| I'm with you right up until point #3, but I'm really
| struggling with the last bit. $100 doesn't even sound
| like "prosumer" money to me. If $100 is really a show
| stopper for your million dollar business, you need to
| charge more.
| dave78 wrote:
| The root of the issue is that things were working fine
| before this change for the particular use case of
| computers hooked up to A/V equipment. Perhaps a $100
| dongle can fix it, but the point is that the $100 device
| wasn't needed before - people were happy with the way it
| was (again, for this use case - I see the value in the
| dot for other use cases obviously).
|
| Furthermore, while I'm not an expert on these $100
| dongles, my understanding is that they do not present as
| just another monitor (since that would defeat the
| purpose). Thus, you cannot just show anything on their
| outputs that you could otherwise show on a monitor,
| right? My understanding is the application has to be
| written specifically to output to the Decklink (but I may
| very well be wrong on this) - if that's the case then the
| $100 dongle does not fix every situation here since a lot
| of things that get presented may not support it.
| sixothree wrote:
| How are you going to a 150" LED wall and not processing the
| output? I think that's the part I don't get.
| kfarr wrote:
| Well they may be processing the output but the raw input
| has an orange dot so at the very least this is additional
| labor to configure additional custom processing.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| This is not true. If you're processing, you likely are
| using hardware I/O so you're not getting the display
| output, you're getting raw output.
| Macha wrote:
| What's the processing system going to do? Blur that side of
| the screen? I don't think Photoshop context aware fill is
| real time. And both are hacks that will lead to situations
| of clearly wrong outputs
| quadrangle wrote:
| The mouse cursor on the side of the screen is stupid indeed.
| But it doesn't make presentations impossible. I think all the
| objections here are objecting to hyperbole rather than
| defending the dot.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Not presentations, Think big musicians/festivals.
| quadrangle wrote:
| Yeah, I get it. Not gonna be accepted in practice.
| _Could_ be accepted though, it 's not literally useless.
| Being not as bad as literally-useless doesn't mean
| anything about the situation is _good_.
| [deleted]
| kinghtown wrote:
| Visually distracting.. a loss of control in design.. a reminder
| of Apple when you are displaying unrelated content.. A live
| show doesn't need the visual art to have an orange dot. Im
| surprised you can't see how that could matter.
| david422 wrote:
| If you went to the website www.apple.com and there was an
| orange dot in the corner, how long do you think it would be
| before Apple changed it?
| quadrangle wrote:
| Everyone focuses on the dot and can no longer listen to the
| content of the presentation? /s
|
| My honest guess is that the author of the article is SUPER mad
| about this out of some _principle-of-the-thing_ about how the
| design shouldn 't do this, and they just ran with that in
| writing self-righteous nonsense about how this makes
| presentations impossible or something.
|
| It's about as bad as having the cursor show up on the edge of a
| live presentation slide.
| [deleted]
| dangrossman wrote:
| "Live presentation" like "the visuals on the video wall
| behind Mariah Carey while she sings live for 10 million
| people on TV", not "live presentation" like "your PowerPoint
| presentation to your 4 coworkers".
|
| This is a news site for professional digital musicians and
| animators. The kind of people that are in charge of making
| the digital visuals behind a live performance like I
| described. This is not a "principle of the thing" argument,
| it's a "this update stops us from doing our job using Mac
| hardware" argument.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Mariah Carey's team is 100% using hardware I/O devices.
| They will not be affected by this change.
| quadrangle wrote:
| Yeah, I get it. Apple's design is stupid and shouldn't have
| happened. But obviously Mariah Carey CAN sing on TV with a
| little orange dot. Obviously nobody _wants_ that, and in
| practice nobody will accept it. But it remains completely
| possible and would not completely destroy her performance.
|
| The hyperbole here is just so extreme.
| dangrossman wrote:
| If in practice nobody will accept it, then there's
| nothing hyperbolic about the article.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The degree to which people are whinging about the use of
| "useless" to mean "customers who pay creators for this
| work will not accept the result this imposes on it" as
| opposed to "it is not theoretically possible to use the
| device for this purpose with the misfeature at issue"
| is... surprising.
| eropple wrote:
| If it were about ignoring their lovingly set font
| overrides in their browser or their terminal, they'd sing
| a different time. Which is perhaps indicative of the
| empathy gap, but hey.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > The hyperbole here is just so extreme.
|
| You've never been near a show production, have you? I was
| involved with an _amateur theater_ that had some
| projections during one of their plays. Even they were
| _very_ peculiar about what was projected, where, and how.
|
| One of the projections was a black-and white archive
| footage. Yes thank you, I'd love an orange dot there, it
| doesn't ruin it at all.
| quadrangle wrote:
| Honestly, I'm more interested in the way people aren't
| willing to laugh about it.
|
| I mean, yeah, I don't want the dot there. It breaks the
| fourth-wall in a way. But there's something to that too.
| Society of the Spectacle and so on...
|
| It's FUNNY to notice how a little orange dot is taken as
| such a profound threat. People could do well to reflect
| on the whole context a bit. Our dependency on tech and
| the way we depend on a few companies who force things on
| us, it's all serious, scary, and absurd. And this orange
| dot business is not the ultimate example of the problem,
| it's a silly one, that yes, I acknowledge is a huge
| problem for some people's jobs in practice.
|
| I've been around show production stuff, and I don't
| respect the way everyone takes themselves so damned
| seriously in that world. The dadaists were onto
| something.
| simonh wrote:
| They take things so seriously because a lot of money, and
| the livelihoods, reputations and careers of a lot of
| people, depend on many, many apparently tiny details.
| Particularly in live performances every show you get one
| chance to get that show right. One. And then you have to
| do it again, and again. But getting it right for the next
| audience doesn't make it ok that you got it wrong for the
| last audience.
| quadrangle wrote:
| Yeah, I get it. People can be really mad when systems
| they rely on get messed up. It makes PERFECT sense that
| people are really reactive about this awful design
| decision and are saying hyperbolic stuff. The part that
| doesn't make sense is the refusal to acknowledge that
| it's hyperbole. Although, to be fair, when people are
| triggered and reactive, we're rarely in the mood to
| acknowledge such nuance.
| dmitriid wrote:
| In any production things go wrong in a million tiny
| details.
|
| Anything that doesn't have a workaround gets thrown away.
| And nope, it's bot a hyperbole. I've seen lamps discarded
| because they couldn't be made work _just right_ , and
| stage props removed entirely because they looked out of
| place for that particular stage.
|
| "Something is shitty, let's laugh about it and continue
| regardless" is what often separates people who don't care
| from people who do. Unfortunately, seeing all the shit we
| have to put up with daily, those people that do are in
| the minority.
| quadrangle wrote:
| "Something is shitty, let's laugh about it" does NOT
| inevitably require "continue regardless"
|
| The idea that you have to connect laughing with not
| fixing things is evidence of being in a triggered,
| reactive, threatened state.
|
| Did I ever suggest that the problem shouldn't be fixed?
|
| People who can laugh about something are people who
| aren't in a state of threat. And yes, those who don't
| care are less likely to be threatened. But we can also
| find ourselves in situations where we are willing to
| laugh and not be so defensive and self-righteous while we
| _still_ care about things.
|
| In our outrage-driven society, that's the _real_
| minority: people who CARE and are also willing to laugh
| and not be in a victim mentality. And to be clear, this
| isn 't some fundamental feature like we simply are one
| way or the other. These are states we can shift between,
| and most people are shifting all the time.
| fold3 wrote:
| It mostly concern artists that present video such as for art
| exhibition or VJ live shows I believe. Any unintended visuals
| would kill the immersion, the aesthetics and looks
| unprofessional. Like leaving the mouse cursor visible or UI
| elements.
|
| I see that some people above suggested a solution with an extra
| hardware device but even though a lot of theses creatives are
| using macs, they aren't especially tech literate outside of
| their field and have to make do with venue that can use quirky
| hardware with sometimes very limited time to set up their
| gears.
|
| This dot is a major pita for these users.
| rainbowzootsuit wrote:
| My interpretation from the article is that you might imagine
| the external display output is a video wall for a concert with
| a full screen visual show being synced to music or something,
| thus the simultaneous audio capture going on.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| For the same reason why you may not want to see an orange dot
| when you watch a movie in a theater and also the reason art
| galleries don't put orange dots in front of artworks.
|
| It is a special case where Macs connected to a projector are
| used to display live visual. The microphone is on, most likely
| so that the visuals can respond to sounds, and you get to show
| an ugly orange dot to your audience.
|
| Macs are used a lot in the entertainment industry so it is not
| an insignificant problem.
| treesprite82 wrote:
| For a lot of the examples being given in this thread, like
| billboards and movies, I'd actually welcome an orange dot
| notifying me that audio is being recorded - since that's not
| an expectation I'd otherwise have. Though this probably isn't
| what Apple are trying to do, and would need to be enforced to
| prevent circumvention.
|
| The initial example of live shows (specifically the subset of
| which where the same device is being used for some kind of
| audio input and visual output) is so far the most convincing
| example because the orange dot is redundant there.
| simonh wrote:
| It's not being recorded, the Audi input is being used to
| generate reactive video responsive to the audio track.
| treesprite82 wrote:
| I note "some kind of audio input" for that case.
| Notifying of audio-recording billboards/etc. is a
| separate case signalled by the dot (which I think could
| theoretically be a positive, but isn't practically
| achieved with just this change).
| kube-system wrote:
| From purely a privacy perspective, that is an interesting
| comparison. Some art installations that record their
| observers _do_ have disclaimers that recording is happening,
| sometimes by law.
| bena wrote:
| That dot is there to let people know that there's a live mic
| listening to them and possibly recording them in case they don't
| want that, right?
|
| So basically, what this guy is saying is that sometimes he wants
| to show an app that is listening to the audience, but without
| letting his audience know that they could be recorded by his
| application.
|
| Here's the crux of his issue.
|
| "In the interest of security and privacy, Apple on macOS Monterey
| has added a prominent orange dot to display outputs when audio
| capture is active. That renders their machines unusable for live
| visual performance, though, since it's also shown on external
| displays. Dear macOS team - we urgently need a fix here.
|
| The basic idea here is sound - to avoid software hijacking your
| camera and audio input and spying on you, essentially, there's an
| orange dot to let you know recording is active. But this
| essentially makes the Mac unusable for live visuals, since it
| impacts external projectors and LED walls and the like. (Those
| applications don't even need to be obviously using audio; live
| visuals often use mic or line input to produce sound-reactive
| animation and the like."
|
| Here's where I feel he's being disingenuous:
|
| "Those applications don't even need to be obviously using audio;
| live visuals often use mic or line input to produce sound-
| reactive animation and the like."
|
| So they're not using audio, but may be using the microphone or
| line input to access sound for "reasons". That's called "using
| audio". He's trying to draw a distinction that doesn't exist. He
| wants to make it clear he's using audio in a non-privacy-
| violating way. And I believe that he is. I do believe he's a
| good-faith actor who is just trying to use audio input to enhance
| certain presentations.
|
| However, it has the same behavior as people who do not act in
| good faith. This is a prime example of dipshits ruining it for
| everyone. There can't really be an exception because then that
| exception just gets used by the bad faith actors in the space.
|
| To solve his problem what he really needs is a monitor/projector
| that doesn't show the top however many pixels required by the
| menu bar. In a very amateur way, this would be accomplished with
| a piece of electrical tape over the monitor. For a projector,
| there could possible be a special lens cap that cuts off the
| required area. Like a matte lens.
| dangrossman wrote:
| 1- I doubt anyone at Apple intended the orange dot to be
| broadcast to everyone watching their television during a live
| musical performance on SNL with visuals in the background. It
| is not possible for the performance to be recording any of the
| viewers, so there's no possible "dipshit" to be protected from.
|
| 2- The dot appears on secondary displays running full screen
| video: there is no menu bar to crop off. You can only crop off
| part of the visuals, or your visuals have to be lower
| resolution to produce artificial dead area to crop.
|
| 3- Apple has never given any indication that they intend to add
| indicators that someone else is being recorded by my computer.
| The indicators are for the computer owner, to indicate that
| software may be recording the owner without their knowledge.
| The parties are all different than you're supposing.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| >during a live musical performance on SNL
|
| I promise you that the people who do those visuals for SNL
| (and every other wacky scenario people are coming up with)
| are not mirroring or extending their desktops. They're using
| dedicated video hardware for this exact reason.
| bena wrote:
| Others have addressed 1.
|
| 2 - The dot essentially forces a bar. It's not an overlay on
| the application's graphics. This is what is shown in the
| images. So there is something to crop off.
|
| Not to mention, if it is known, it can be planned around.
| This is exactly what television has been doing for years.
| There are scan lines that don't get shown on screens despite
| being broadcast.
|
| 3 - This is almost as disingenuous as the article. The dot is
| there to inform the user of the device/screen that they could
| be recorded. The audience during a performance _would_
| qualify as a user in this case. It 's basically an indicator
| saying, "if you can see this, it's possible the device
| showing this is recording your audio". That is completely
| relevant for an audience. If you think it's not, then why is
| it relevant for anyone else. There are thousands of excuses
| one can use to justify hiding this information from anybody.
| Once you are potentially violating _my_ privacy, it is
| relevant to me.
| [deleted]
| foreigner wrote:
| Easy - just incorporate the orange dot in to the design. Surround
| the entire scene with orange dots and then it won't look out of
| place.
| asplake wrote:
| Would this impact recording on Screenflow? I won't be upgrading
| my main machine until I know for sure.
| vbphprubyjsgo wrote:
| This is yet another instance of the OS reuse problem, e.g., where
| airports, banks, medical terminals, etc have all kinds of
| unwanted features because the software is based on booting a GUI
| OS desktop and using hacks to make it display the program. Not
| valid engineering of course.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| "Not valid engineering of course."???
|
| Yes, it would obviously be much more "valid engineering" to
| have each of these devices have their own custom, invariably
| much buggier and crappier, OS.
| _ph_ wrote:
| I am all for features which help the user to control the users
| privacy. Having a LED with the web cam for example is a very good
| thing. Though it doesn't tell you what is accessing it and
| recording you against your will...
|
| It totally makes sense to display those privacy notifications in
| the desktop UI. However, when an app goes to full-screen mode,
| the OS shouldn't interfere with the display by default. There are
| plenty of szenarios, where the program needs to be able to
| control every single pixel of the screen.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| >There are plenty of szenarios, where the program needs to be
| able to control every single pixel of the screen.
|
| In those cases, there are hardware solutions for this. That's
| not the default in any OS right now. Notifications and menu
| bars cannot be disabled by apps, for example. They need to be
| disabled from the OS level.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Of course menu bars are disabled by default in full-screen
| mode, notifications can be disabled on Mojave at least. That
| is the whole purpose of a "full screen mode", that the whole
| screen content is controlled by the app.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| >whole screen content is controlled by the app.
|
| That is not the purpose of full screen mode. If that were
| the case, then notifications and menu bars would be able to
| be disabled by the app. They're not. They need to be
| disabled or muted by the user at the OS level.
| _ph_ wrote:
| About which OS are you talking? On MacOS and Linux, a
| program can go to full screen mode without any user
| interaction. The last time I saw a powerpoint
| presentation on Windows, it also didn't have a menu bar
| or task bar in presentation model. So what are you
| talking about?
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Let's say you're giving a PowerPoint and an app crashes
| in the background (for whatever reason). PowerPoint
| cannot prevent an OS alert from popping up on the screen.
| macOS has functions to hide the menu bar in full-screen
| apps but it does not have functions to stop other OS
| chrome from appearing.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Yes, there are circumstances where the OS is overriding
| the full screen mode of an application. Usually only in
| the case of very significant events or user interaction -
| like moving your mouse to the screen top will show the
| menu bar on Mac OS. But all of this isn't shown
| permanentely on top of the full screen app and only
| triggered by special events.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| That's not the point. The point is that it can happen
| during a performance unless you're using a dedicated
| piece of I/O hardware. They give you 100% control over
| what gets outputted. Just because people were ok with
| what the OS displayed before doesn't mean that that it
| couldn't.
| _ph_ wrote:
| We are talking about different things. Yes, you cannot
| 100% prevent a dialog to appear without custom hardware.
| And of course, even with custom hardware, the OS could
| decide to disable it to stop output to it.
|
| But this isn't the point. So far, there were full screen
| modes and the OS would honor those under regular
| circumstances. When I run a Linux VM on a Mac, I can see
| the whole Linux desktop full screen. I don't want MacOS
| draw colored dots on top of my Linux VM. People probably
| don't want yellow dots on their PowerPoint presentation.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| No, we're not. The only difference in what we're talking
| about is that you were ok with the exact same thing as
| now because you _liked /agreed_ with what the OS was
| putting on the screen. Whether it was because it was rare
| or uncommon is completely besides the point. This whole
| thread is about people who are saying that the dot makes
| the display "unusable". If that was the case, then any
| other OS chrome would also make it unusable.
| _ph_ wrote:
| No, that is wrong. So far the OS didn't display anything
| permanentely on top of a full screen app. It was only as
| a reaction to user input and exceptional situations.
| Especially (under MacOS), when the full screen app was
| runninning on a secondary screen. I can only hope/assume,
| I misunderstood the article or this is just a bug.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| No, it's not wrong. That's what I said. It still doesn't
| do anything _permanently_. It only does it if you 're
| using audio input actively. That's a reaction to user
| input. You're enabling a recording device and that's what
| triggers this OS chrome. Whether you agree with that is
| irrelevant since full-screen mode has _always_ allowed OS
| chrome.
| _ph_ wrote:
| That is something entirely different. When I said active
| user input, it was a concrete reaction to a specific user
| action, like moving the mouse at the menu area. There is
| no such user action, which would be triggering a sound
| recording. This is about running applications in the
| background. According to the article, that would taint
| the full screen mode constantly and not transiently as
| the other actions. It is fully sufficently, if that
| happens on the primary screen.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Then you didn't understand the article. The dot is only
| on-screen when an audio recording device is active.
| _ph_ wrote:
| I understood that. You are not understanding the problem
| or pretending to. Imagine a powerpoint presentation
| during a video conference. I don't want the presentation
| overlaid by a yellow dot. There was no such thing like
| that so far. At minimum, there need to be controls to
| prevent that.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| And I'm telling you _yes there is_. You could still get
| an alert from Steam logging in on your full-screen app.
| You could get a Windows Visual C Runtime Error that pops
| up on top of it. You could get a macOS notification or a
| kernel panic report and it would pop up right on top of
| your full screen application. Apps _cannot_ override the
| I /O system of the OS.
| _ph_ wrote:
| I never claimed they can. But so far you can run an app
| in full screen mode and unless a special event happens,
| you won't get something on top of it. The audio indicator
| is completely different, because as long there is audio
| recording in your system, you don't seem to be able to
| get rid of it. At no time. If nothing exceptional happens
| on your system, the OS should allow full-screen apps to
| run. So far, all OSes did so.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Isn't that Do Not Disturb mode?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum... What goes or doesn't go into a full screen app
| should be controlled by the user at the OS, with no
| involvement of the app.
|
| That still doesn't change the fact that the point in
| making an app full screen is to give it control of the
| entire screen (or an entire virtual one of your
| choosing).
| _ph_ wrote:
| As a p.s. to my last comment: I just tried a silly Gtk
| based tetris I had written some ago under MacOS: hit the
| green maximize button and it goes completely full screen.
| The only thing you still see is the mouse pointer - I am
| sure there is an API to make that invisible too, if one
| wanted to hide the mouse pointer.
|
| I have never ever owened a computer where an application
| could not controle the whole screen. Yes, there are
| situations, where the OS supersedes the full screen apps
| input, but usually they are based on user interactions or
| notifications (which can be disabled).
| dkonofalski wrote:
| >I have never ever owened a computer where an application
| could not controle the whole screen.
|
| Yes you have. Every OS has chrome that cannot be disabled
| in full-screen. You may not regularly experience that,
| but it does. Imagine you're playing a video game and
| Windows Update throws an error. That will be displayed
| _over_ your full-screen game window. It doesn 't even
| have to be originated by the OS. As long as the OS is
| provided with an extended display, it has the ability to
| put things on top of whatever your app displays. It may
| not happen often but it does happen. That's the primary
| reason why dedicate I/O hardware exists.
| _ph_ wrote:
| As I wrote in the answer to your other comment, I have
| never claimed, that there aren't events that can cause
| the OS to supersede a fullscreen app. But by default, the
| OS does not display additional information on top of a
| full screen app. And perhaps we should discuss the same
| thing only in one thread.
| muhehe wrote:
| It's ok. Give it a few weeks, people will get used to it and
| several apps will pop up on other platforms so you can pretend
| you have expensive Mac.
| yob28 wrote:
| pahn wrote:
| hm, i just tested this on my macbook and the way it seems to work
| is certainly breaking live visuals, but at the same time does not
| protect people from being recorded: if i start an audio recording
| and then watch a film fullscreen, the orange dot does show, but
| then vanishes (while still recording the audio). not sure if this
| is intentional or a bug, but it would certainly render my
| computer unusable for quite some work i do. audiovisuals almost
| always are reactive to sound in one way or or another, so you do
| record the ambient audio for your video or installation be able
| to react to it.
| mediocregopher wrote:
| I'm all for shitting on apple, but does the orange dot actually
| obstruct anything? It seems to just be sitting in the
| notification bar being out of the way.
| CharlesW wrote:
| This is spelled out _very_ clearly in the article, more than
| once.
| [deleted]
| buildbuildbuild wrote:
| Visual artists often use secondary monitor outputs to display
| media on projectors or large LED walls. Secondary outputs are
| also commonly used in broadcast for keyed font overlays among
| other things.
|
| Power users should be able to disable anything.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > I'm all for shitting on apple
|
| why?
| 8bitben wrote:
| This is a tough intersection between highly-visible privacy
| controls and the ability for artists to use their Macs in live
| performance situations where any overlays could be a distraction.
|
| In the Privacy menu in MacOS now, you can authorize applications
| to do things like use locations services and record the screen. I
| think it would be reasonable to include an authorization for
| audio recording and bypass the orange indicator. Or they could
| turn on the webcam green light when audio input is active?
| Illniyar wrote:
| No it's not. Enable by default. Provide a way to disable for
| those who need it, done.
|
| It's just not apple's way to think users might want to do
| things differently.
| ridaj wrote:
| This is desktops creeping towards an attitude, familiar on
| Apple's phones, in which the user is essentially untrusted to
| make security decisions. Because let's face it nobody seriously
| audits the security of software going onto Macs. The loser is
| the user's freedom to enjoy the computer as a true general-
| purpose tool.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| You're assuming malicious intent where none exists. This
| feature is a security gain for users -- previously there was
| _no way_ to know if your mic was being used. Now there is.
| It's giving me extra information I can use to make security
| decisions, where previously I had none of that information.
|
| It's unfortunate it causes problems for some users, hopefully
| a fix will be forthcoming, but I believe it's an oversight.
| ridaj wrote:
| I'm not saying it's malicious, I'm just saying it's a
| trade-off. Fwiw I understand the trade-off and it makes
| sense to me even as a Mac user.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Fair enough. I suppose I would characterize it more as
| Apple not trusting developers, rather than not trusting
| users.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Maybe this makes more sense if we view this as involving
| _three_ parties: Apple, users, and app developers.
|
| On OSX at least, some apps are developed by third parties
| whose code isn't easily scrutinized by Apple or by end users.
|
| I think Apple's policy helps users navigate that situation
| pretty well. But I also can't see any good reason to prevent
| users from disabling that feature in a fine-grained way. E.g.
| per app and/or temporarily.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| No it's not; this thread is full of solutions that power
| users can apply to avoid or remove the orange dot.
|
| Apple not taken anything away. What they have done is change
| a default. Since defaults matter most to the least savvy
| users, skewing defaults toward security makes sense. Power
| users can apply extra skill to change the default; that's
| what makes them power users.
| minhazm wrote:
| The webcam light won't work if you're using a laptop in
| clamshell mode, or even using a Mac Mini/Pro. I think the best
| middle ground for this is to allow users to grant some
| permission that allows the app to access the Mic without
| turning the orange dot on.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Or a simple toggle deep in the system settings: "Show
| indicator when using a microphone or webcam".
| tedunangst wrote:
| Why would spyware not request this permission?
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| I think the implication in the post was that the user would
| be prompted to grant the permission, so they would have to
| click "Yes" when the spyware asked for permission.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Were this to be a permission, there would be no legitimate
| use case where "hide microphone use indicator" would be a
| required function. Anything that requires that should be
| flagged immediately as hostile.
| ly wrote:
| I think the webcam light is completely controlled by the
| hardware signal, so the only way to turn that light on/off is
| by turning on the webcam itself, which I don't think is desired
| either.
| jahewson wrote:
| I would not assume that is the case, if it's even possible. I
| hope it is though!
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
| switch/wp/2013/12/18...
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| 2013... The T2 chips controlling the webcam didn't arrive
| until 2017.
| [deleted]
| lolpython wrote:
| This isn't good. Most of the live visuals I've seen are in a
| dimly lit room with a black background. Often this is so that
| it's hard to see the edges of the screen and the visualization
| appears to be floating. Having an orange dot in the corner would
| break the immersion for the audience. It's also going to be
| larger when projected, maybe a couple inches in diameter.
| skytreader wrote:
| This is the first explainer in this thread that makes me see
| the issue. All this time I'm thinking along the lines of "Okay
| you're, projecting video in a wedding. Now there's an orange
| dot on the screen. Boohoo."
|
| So, apparently, I gotta dream bigger. Like museum AVP or
| concert/live performance/DJing type of live visuals. Yeah now
| an orange dot _is_ a showstopper.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| > And it does seem there could be a fix here; you already have to
| give applications permission to access your mic and camera, and
| it seems there should be some way for an app to disable the
| orange dot once its permissions are elevated with opt-in by the
| user.
|
| The obvious caveat is that a hacker w/ local access can do that
| themselves to hide their system foothold, which is just par-for-
| the-course when it comes to physically compromised machines...
| except I'm willing to bet they're more concerned with "jealous
| ex" than they are with professional hackers.
|
| Apple is trying to add features to protect against the
| unprotectable instead of just acknowledging that at some point
| local access means game over; the only way to do that is to make
| it virtually unbearable to use the OS as a regular user (see UAC
| in Windows Vista).
| exabrial wrote:
| Security Features aren't useful if they can't be disabled for
| legitimate purposes. Instead they turn into Windows UAC prompts.
| zwily wrote:
| I think other vendors will start copying the dot, notch-style, so
| pretty soon live performances without the dot will seem lame.
| adolph wrote:
| _I just updated straight from macOS Catalina to Monterey, and one
| thing that 's really bugging me is the Microphone Usage indicator
| in the top right corner. I have this app called "Background
| Music" to help amplify the otherwise terrible audio of my
| earbuds. I know it's using my microphone; I don't need this
| constant annoying overlay. Anyone know a solution?_
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qhbt4n/how_to_disabl...
| willis936 wrote:
| Why is microphone and camera usage indicated through a software
| stack onto a display? Shouldn't there be an LED tied to the power
| in pin on these peripherals?
| vintagedave wrote:
| Yes! Just as there is for the camera, there should be a
| hardware indicator for the microphone (perhaps enabled by
| software for an external mic; ditto for an external webcam.)
|
| One of the best features on Macs for the past couple of decades
| has been the small green light. They should add this, as
| hardware, to iPhones and iPads. Software dots on the status bar
| indicate to me that the OS people view it as a key issue but
| the hardware folk haven't caught up to the issue yet.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| In the film editing space workstations use dedicated video I/O
| hardware which fully circumvents the display/video stack of the
| OS to be able to input/output exactly the pixels you want in
| exactly the format you want (something that's essentially
| impossible using OS facilities, much less in a cross-platform
| manner). This seems like a very good application for those cards
| (they're not particularly expensive, around 200 bucks [1]).
|
| [1]
| https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/decklink/techspecs...
| (4K, PCIe)
| https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ultrastudio/techsp...
| (less than 100 bucks, but only 1080p on Thunderbolt) (SDK:
| https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/developer/product/capture-a...)
| vbphprubyjsgo wrote:
| Booting Linux and displaying some graphics on DRM-KMS sounds
| much saner.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I'm guessing the downvotes are because your suggestion seems
| like a pretty big departure from these users' existing
| setups.
|
| I think the migration costs (including the learning curves)
| might seem like a poor tradeoff.
| cyberge99 wrote:
| And the fact that linux on new Macbook Pros isn't feature
| complete yet.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| I'm 100% certain that most professionals are already using
| these for performance displays. I don't know a single person
| that doesn't use these cards for exactly this reason. We even
| use one for presentations/events at movie theatres just to make
| sure that nothing is going to put an errant pop up on the
| display.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Are they capable of realtime GPU-rendered graphics out of the
| box, or just video?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| You can render on your GPU to a texture, then stream that
| texture to these devices. No different to rendering to your
| screen and then streaming and saving to disk, as you would
| do if you were screen capturing.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| They need a GPU to function. They are just input/output
| devices.
| odiroot wrote:
| How do you operate them? Do they show up as another graphics
| card?
| dkonofalski wrote:
| No. If they did, that would defeat the purpose. Usually,
| they have their own setup software or routing software.
| Something like Blackmagic, for example, is supported
| directly from certain apps. Others let you route windows to
| the output. You still need a graphics card for these to
| work. They _only_ handle the video input and output.
| odiroot wrote:
| Ok. I'm on Linux and want to play a movie with VLC
| through this thing. Do I need the Blackmagic app to act
| as a bridge or something?
| dkonofalski wrote:
| I'm not terribly familiar with Linux use of hardware I/O
| devices so my guess would be yes unless Blackmagic (or
| someone else) makes some kind of Linux kernel extension
| that would allow you to manually specify that or VLC has
| built-in support for external I/O devices.
|
| Edit: Just checked because I was curious. The default
| installs of VLC do not include Blackmagic support but you
| can compile versions from the source for Linux that
| include it (if you also download the support files from
| Blacklink first).
| dnet wrote:
| Not sure about VLC, but ffmpeg has great support for
| Blackmagic, you just have to download the Blackmagic SDK,
| compile ffmpeg with Blackmagic support (and the SDK in
| path) and then you'll have a separate input/output device
| available in ffmpeg. The other great thing about this
| approach is that this way audio also takes a dedicated,
| integrated path, bypassing OS layers and maintaining sync
| with much less effort.
| tjohns wrote:
| VLC has built-in support for Blackmagic SDI output cards:
|
| https://github.com/videolan/vlc/blob/master/modules/video
| _ou...
|
| Though a quick search through online forums suggest that
| module isn't compiled into Ubuntu's version of VLC by
| default, so you may need to compile your own version:
|
| https://gist.github.com/afriza/cd9ce01a7b47b9bd3f192e95af
| 1a0...
| dkonofalski wrote:
| I can confirm. This is what I was able to find too. You
| can compile from source using the support files from
| Blackmagic.
| lolpython wrote:
| What is this equipment called? It sounds like the opposite of a
| capture card.
|
| edit: looking at your updated post, it is called a "playback
| card."
| NavinF wrote:
| Could you give an example of such a card? (model/name)
|
| Also what's the use case where they can't export the video and
| transfer it as a file or byte stream?
| buildbuildbuild wrote:
| These are great: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ul
| trastudio/techsp...
|
| Use case: live (minimizing latency), no compression,
| compatibility with other gear.
| fragmede wrote:
| https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/developer/product/capture-a.
| ..
|
| The cheapness of greenscreen effects makes it pretty cheap to
| use in TV shows a lot these days though.
| buildbuildbuild wrote:
| A good suggestion if you have the budget. NDI is also
| incredible for this. But small producers rely heavily on built-
| in I/O on their computers, and I suspect that the market share
| from small/amateur streamers using Apple products outsizes
| Apple's revenue from large shops today.
|
| Big productions can afford Decklinks and media servers like
| Disguise D3.
| ridaj wrote:
| Small producers spend lots of money on equipment in that
| range of cost, even for ancillary things like lighting and
| cables. I think it's a great recommendation.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| There are a _lot_ of guys out there with 2016 era macbooks
| (cause it still has HDMI) running it into a projector to do
| visuals at small clubs and things like that.
|
| _Maybe_ some of those guys scraped together enough money
| to buy one of the new macbooks (since it got HDMI back).
| Being forced to spend another $200 to get rid of a stupid
| orange dot would really sting.
| ridaj wrote:
| Those guys can probably crop at the projector though and
| not lose too much? Last I played with projectors was
| around 2010 and back then crop controls already came
| standard
| emteycz wrote:
| 2015 was the last MacBook with HDMI. Anyways I agree with
| you but it's true there is a lot of the richer
| professionals too - those who buy the new maxxed out
| MacBooks.
| DenseComet wrote:
| Incredibly, the new Macbook Pros released this year have
| HDMI, a SD card slot, and MagSafe.
| jinto36 wrote:
| NDI is fantastic, having dealt with racks of gear for
| switching and video distribution before I get excited about
| the possibilities every time I play with it. Dedicated
| hardware for bridging NDI to input and output devices is also
| appearing. It's a lossy solution (the video is compressed,
| unlike SDI/HDMI) but for live productions I'd definitely be
| willing to use NDI throughout (cameras -> switching ->
| recording/projection/streaming).
|
| So long as they keep NDI Tools free. It would be great if
| they could also eventually build in some of the functionality
| of Dante (NDI is something like Dante but for video) since
| the Dante software toolkit is very much not free. I think
| Newtek has been on the right track.
| MayeulC wrote:
| They surely have enough money to buy macbooks, and something
| like this is a fraction of the cost (seems about 10%).
|
| Of course, I'm also confident that software workarounds will
| exist in the meantime.
| ehvatum wrote:
| rched wrote:
| > MacOS is a strictly consumer-facing platform for running App
| Store Apps
|
| What are you basing that on? Apple markets these products
| directly to professionals in a lot of cases. They even sell
| professional audio software.
| pvarangot wrote:
| > for running App Store Apps
|
| MacOS runs whatever you want it to run if you decide to trust
| the developer.
| dmd wrote:
| As a Mac user who doesn't use and has never used any App Store
| Apps, what the ____ are you talking about?
| tqi wrote:
| > MacOS is a strictly consumer-facing platform for running App
| Store Apps, so I'm confused as to who is even objecting to this
| feature.
|
| So true, which is why so many of their products have "Pro" in
| the name.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Stop waiting on Apple. Turn off SIP, find the function
| responsible for this, and swizzle it with a no-op.
|
| This, in my mind, is exactly what makes SIP brilliant as a
| default but optional feature. It's fantastic for 95% of Mac
| users, who can browse the web and write emails confident in the
| knowledge that their microphone is turned off. The remaining 5%
| need to do weird crap like run live music shows, and should take
| advantage of the escape hatch.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Unfortunately, "weird crap like [running] live music shows" is
| what Apple markets their devices for, and since they're selling
| machines that have thousand-dollar price premiums over their
| competitors, I should hope their attitude isn't "fix it for
| yourself". I know a number of Mac musicians who run live shows
| and can neither grok what you just suggested _or_ be bothered
| to disable SIP and lose all their iLok plugins before a show.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > disable SIP and lose all their iLok plugins
|
| Wait, what? Does this mean that SIP is now de facto mandatory
| on macOS, unless you don't use any DRM-encumbered programs?
| smoldesu wrote:
| My bad, Freudian slip. I meant enable.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Sorry, I'm actually confused by the reverse--are there
| DRM systems which require SIP to be enabled now?! That's
| awful!
| treesknees wrote:
| In theses cases, is audio being input into the Mac and that's why
| it shows up, because they're "recording" into the application
| generating the visuals? I don't understand why the Microphone
| notification is there at all if it's just outputting audio/video.
| Are these applications recording audio? Or is it just a result of
| the APIs/permissions they end up using?
|
| Seems like there should be a compromise where apps that are using
| line input instead of the physical microphone could be exempt
| from the dot.
| dangrossman wrote:
| The article covered this.
|
| "live visuals often use mic or line input to produce sound-
| reactive animation and the like"
| ratww wrote:
| Is there a line input on newer MacBooks? I thought the jack
| had just mic input!
|
| Also, does anyone knows whether the orange dot shows up when
| you also use an external USB audio interface? If so this is
| kind of stupid on the part of Apple.
|
| The article also mentions that those apps turn on Microphone
| capture even when unnecessary, so it seems the dot it's doing
| its job, although obviously there was a massive oversight,
| and there should have been a special permission to disable
| IMO.
| rzzzt wrote:
| I have one sample from 2011-ish era MacBook Pro that
| allowed switching between line-level and mic input for the
| input plug, via a dropdown in sound settings. The single
| "shared" plugs on Retina units no longer support this, I
| think.
| [deleted]
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Yes. the problem is visuals accompanying live music
| performance. Even if that particular computer is not being used
| for music, many of the visuals are reactive.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Yes, the dot is there to indicate to people that they might be
| being recorded. There's no way to distinguish if the line input
| is just another microphone or not so exempting that wouldn't
| solve the issue Apple is trying to solve.
| [deleted]
| saurik wrote:
| It seems like the core issue is trivial to fix: make the orange
| dot only appear on the primary display. I don't see any advantage
| to spamming the orange dot to every single display output, given
| that the primary display is the one the user is presumably
| _primarily_ interacting with (somewhat by definition).
| phkahler wrote:
| >> It seems like the core issue is trivial to fix: make the
| orange dot only appear on the primary display.
|
| Or just have an actual physical LED nearby, maybe in the notch.
| They're cheap too, we decorate Christmas trees with them these
| days.
| gbear605 wrote:
| That doesn't help for non-laptop devices, or if the laptop is
| running in clamshell mode.
| saurik wrote:
| In addition to the sibling complaint about using a real
| monitor / closed laptop--which I do constantly, making my
| primary display a third-party panel from Samsung--I guess I
| disagree that a fix that would require retrofitting a new LED
| that didn't exist into a piece of hardware could ever be
| "trivial" in the way my suggested software update could be
| (but then again, I am not a hardware person, so maybe there
| is some kind of cheap, magic LED sticker they make these days
| that Apple could offer people for free at the Apple Store).
| Sidnicious wrote:
| I made a very quick hack to deal with this; it should hide the
| dot. Improvements welcome:
|
| https://github.com/s4y/undot
|
| EDIT: As far as I know, the best long-term answer here is for
| apps that present visuals full screen to "capture" the external
| display for exclusive use using an API (https://developer.apple.c
| om/documentation/coregraphics/14562...), but that's not super
| common right now.
| ratww wrote:
| Great work!
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Can you explain the approach a bit? Looks like you're finding
| the window holding the dot and moving it offscreen?
| Sidnicious wrote:
| Yes, exactly. I'm sure there are more elegant answers -- plus
| watching events so that it can hide the window right away
| instead of running in a loop -- but I haven't used the
| accessibility APIs much lately and this is the first working
| approach I found.
| palijer wrote:
| On vacation and no laptop, but perhaps someone can add better
| readme directions to the patch.
|
| To us software folks, I t makes sense, but I imagine this'll be
| linked to many individuals outside of software who won't know
| even what git is or how to get the fix.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Is that really all it takes to disable this? I guess if I'm a
| malware author looking to do surreptitious recording, I'll have
| to bundle these extra 10 lines of code lol...
| Sidnicious wrote:
| You can, but note that as a user you have to open System
| Preferences and check a checkbox to allow said malware to do
| this. (Apple locked down the accessibility APIs that let apps
| easily manipulate each other a few years ago.)
| sildur wrote:
| Then I'd simply call this program before recording audio.
| Etheryte wrote:
| The user has to manually open System Preferences and
| allow this program all the same. One place where this
| workaround would work for malware is embedding in apps
| that are expected to need these rights though.
| sildur wrote:
| I mean, I'd take advantage of that program. If it's
| already installed then it probably has the permissions
| granted. So I'd only have to run it before recording
| audio.
| btown wrote:
| On my machine, Dropbox, Alfred, BetterTouchTools, and
| Bartender have this permission. Zoom is in the list of
| apps that can be given this permission, but the
| permission is disabled by default and Zoom works fine
| without it - though the very fact that some may have
| given this permission to Zoom might be a cause of alarm!
| And it's possible Apple may patch away the ability of
| accessibility tools to mess with this, without giving a
| better system-level way to disable it...
| zorgmonkey wrote:
| If I had to guess Zoom is probably using the
| accessibility API to implement their remote control
| feature. I don't know enough about the other apps to
| guess why they need it, but dropbox needing accessibility
| permissions does sound strange.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| > As far as I know, the best long-term answer here is for apps
| that present visuals full screen to "capture" the external
| display for exclusive use using an API...
|
| If I'm understanding you correctly, that means there's already
| a supported workaround for this if apps just use that API? I
| don't want to downplay the annoyance of this for apps that
| _aren 't_ using that API, but this suggests there's already an
| official answer.
|
| I'm mildly surprised the orange dot shows up in full-screen
| apps; I was going to suggest that might be the easiest "fix"
| for Apple to make that doesn't require either adding a new
| security setting or taking away the indicator entirely -- have
| it only show up in the menu bar, and not when the menu bar
| isn't present.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Grabbing into a different programs UI to move some dot off-
| screen by 99999 pixels does not exactly rise to the level of
| an API.
| csydas wrote:
| I'd like to ask a follow-up also as I don't do any Mac dev,
| but has this API been around for a bit then? Like Monterey
| has been out for a bit and it's a little surprising that this
| article and the subsequent discussion is only popping up now,
| especially if there is an API answer to it already.
|
| I ask earnestly if the change is really such a substantial
| one?
|
| I have mixed feelings after reading the comments as I think
| that there are fairly valid arguments in both directions
| (e.g., that the solutions are plentiful, but also that
| workarounds aren't really a solution), but the arguments feel
| a bit empty if there's a "right" way to be handling the
| visuals that just isn't being used.
|
| As a user I like the change in general as I have caught
| naughty applications that try to use mic input when I really
| don't want it, and my misclick/absentmindedness is not
| uncommon, so seeing such things helps a lot as I don't really
| think it's reasonable to constantly be checking the various
| app permissions to make sure they're what I want. This is a
| good reminder for me.
|
| But I totally get not wanting the dot, as it's even been a
| prank on a site I go to to have a tiny red pixel just to
| annoy people (and it's a prank I've used). So I get the
| frustration with an unexpected visual. But, if there's a way
| to do the same activity by having the app utilize the correct
| API, it seems like an issue that is solved in the next update
| from these visual production apps, no?
| shortformblog wrote:
| That you built this in such a short span of time is impressive,
| and really does a great job undercutting the "security" reasons
| for the dot to be there.
| klodolph wrote:
| I don't think this undercuts the security reasons. I think
| the general idea is that if you leave Zoom / FaceTime / OBS
| open and recording, the orange dot is there. Same dot, same
| place, no matter what app you are using, as long as the
| developer doesn't disable it.
|
| Using the API to disable the dot requires some pretty scary
| permissions to be enabled on the app disabling the dot.
| bww wrote:
| Sure, a program couldn't have a level of access that it's
| not supposed to have. Let's design security beginning with
| that assumption.
| Starmina wrote:
| Thanks, Seems to work great.
|
| Hacky way to have it running all the time :
|
| I put this into a bash file to run the loop in the background
| at boot.
|
| Just add the .sh in Preferences > Users & Group > Login Items
|
| Then don't forget to chmod +x the bash file so it can be run.
|
| --
|
| #!/bin/bash
|
| nohup bash -c 'while :; do /Users/starmina/Scripts/undot/undot;
| sleep 1; done' </dev/null >/dev/null 2>&1 &
|
| --
|
| I'd be glad to hear a of a better way to do it.
| beervirus wrote:
| >showstopper
|
| That's a funny word for "extremely minor visual artifact."
| modeless wrote:
| Maybe you could use the accessibility zoom feature to zoom in
| slightly and crop it out? Silly workaround though.
| madrox wrote:
| People on Windows are about to go through a similar experience as
| Microsoft removes ways of capturing your desktop without an
| obnoxious orange border around the window being recorded. The
| logic is there...you want it obvious and in the user's face if
| something malicious is watching them, but it makes benign use
| cases obnoxious.
|
| Stuff like this is bad security design because it punts
| responsibility to the end user. It doesn't actually stop anything
| bad from happening. If your design can't decide whether to stop a
| program from capturing the mic, how do you expect my grandma to?
| MikusR wrote:
| The border is on screen, but not in captured video.
| Diggsey wrote:
| Except microsoft actually listened to feedback before rolling
| this out everywhere:
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.graphics.ca...
|
| Plus there's almost certainly some registry key you could
| change to turn it off on a per user basis.
| mikequinlan wrote:
| An orange dot "renders their machines unusable"??? That seems
| like an over-reaction.
| kazinator wrote:
| Is this dot anything more than a software feature? If so, its
| absence doesn't actually prove that sound isn't being monitored.
|
| What you want is a dedicated LED that is routed directly to the
| sound input being on at the circuit board level: like the
| amplifier is on, or that path is enabled by hardware or whatever.
| Even then, if the meaning assignment is "LED glowing = sound
| monitored", you cannot trust it entirely: the LED being off could
| mean that the LED itself is faulty. But at least you know that
| the mechanism cannot be tampered with by software.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| yeah, i don't use a screen lock on my computer because a
| sophisticated attacker would just pull my data off my ssd since
| the decryption key is stored in memory anyways.
|
| it is much more valuable to have an indicator that your mic IS
| hot than having no indicator at all, not to mention adding an
| led indicator does fuck all for people who don't buy the
| $currentYear+1 laptop.
| aimor wrote:
| Maybe someone can stick a little reindeer face behind it.
| htunnicliff wrote:
| http://archive.today/bi8UU
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Well... that was a mistake on Apple's part.
|
| Got to wonder who made this decision and how many people reviewed
| it before it was deployed. Then again, most people aren't doing
| audio recording while using Keynote (or Powerpoint). Something
| like this could very easily fly under the radar across the entire
| company.
|
| This looks like one of those problems where the edge cases are
| damned obvious in hindsight but aren't noticed until it hits
| production. Happens to everyone with a non-trivial product.
|
| The real problem here is Apple has a history of ignoring these
| design mistakes for a very long time. Even when they do fix
| things, they have tendency to hide any mention of it. It will
| probably be suddenly and quietly fixed months later in some
| future point update.
| fsflover wrote:
| > The basic idea here is sound - to avoid software hijacking your
| camera and audio input and spying on you, essentially, there's an
| orange dot to let you know recording is active.
|
| Instead, I prefer to use devices with a hardware kill switch for
| camera and microphone, e.g., https://puri.sm/products/librem-14.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| This thread has exposed a very weird dichotomy between HN users
| that believe that they (as owners/operators of the device in
| question) should ultimately be in control of what their machine
| outputs - down to the pixel - at least if and when they care to
| do anything about it, and those that accept it's our role to just
| take whatever bones the manufacturer's are kind enough to throw
| our way, apparently unless and until it is an egregious violation
| of what one considers to be "the" line that shouldn't be crossed.
|
| As a hacker without a horse in this particular race (Macs and I
| parted ways a long time ago), it's definitely interesting to
| observe the interactions between the two groups in this thread!
|
| IMHO the fundamental difference between the two sides is that
| when it's posited as a dogmatic matter, it's immediately clear
| whether or not your (perceived) rights have been violated (Can
| you do X? No => Violation, Yes => Keep chugging along) but for
| the latter group it becomes not just a question of whether or not
| X is possible but also whether or not each individual can agree
| that X should/shouldn't be determined by the vendor/manufacturer
| (c.f. the recent hullabaloo about on-device scanning).
|
| I see similarities to the concept of "I may not agree with what
| you are saying, but I will fight to the death for your right to
| do so," which just makes it so much easier to agree on whether or
| not rights are being infringed, regardless of it's something
| you'd want to engage in yourself or otherwise.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| That's a bit of a false dichotomy, though, because there also
| exists the group of people that are the intended audience for
| this feature that is so dreaded by this small minority. The
| large majority of users benefit from being made aware when an
| application is using their microphone as it helps them see
| whether that's being done without their consent. Apple could,
| in theory, put in a toggle to allow more seasoned users to
| choose to hide that function but then that toggle will just be
| used to compromise the whole point of the feature for the
| majority of their users.
|
| Case in point, my mom is getting paranoid about this stuff
| after watching stuff on Netflix and CNN about how Facebook is
| "listening in" on her. I can easily just tell her to watch for
| the dot and know, with reasonable certainty, that she didn't
| install some app on her own that would hide that.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| What they're missing is that the next feature Apple removes,
| cripples, or otherwise takes out of their control will be one
| that _they_ care about.
|
| General purpose computing was supposed to be for everybody, not
| just approved use(r)s. Apple once told me that. It was a long
| time ago.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| There are at least three ways mentioned in this thread to avoid
| this orange dot.
|
| - The app outputting video can use an OS-level API to capture
| and fully control the external display.
|
| - The Mac owner can use a playback card to output a clean video
| stream.
|
| - The Mac owner can use their root control of the machine to
| disable the dot. (A short script to do so is currently the top
| comment.)
|
| So really, Apple has not taken away rights here. Clean video
| output is still possible. They have changed a default, though.
| based2 wrote:
| AWS has an IBM blue dot for alerts.
| bragr wrote:
| capableweb wrote:
| This has the be the weirdest requirement I've heard from
| someone who wants to read a blogpost on someones website. Why
| it matters if it's behind a CDN or not?
|
| Problem is that the person hasn't handled even a small amount
| of usage load before, even the cheapest instance from
| DigitalOcean + NGINX can handle most loads you throw at it if
| configured properly for static content, which it almost is by
| default when you install it.
| Kiro wrote:
| A single $5 Digital Ocean droplet should be able to handle tens
| of thousands requests a second without any CDN or load
| balancing.
| [deleted]
| radley wrote:
| > http://archive.today/bi8UU
|
| thanks @htunnicliff
| WJW wrote:
| HN: Centralization is the purest form of evil, you should self-
| host everything!
|
| Also HN: If you don't put your site behind a CDN I won't even
| bother reading it because I will lose interest during the 90+
| seconds it takes to load.
|
| (And yes I know that these posts are not usually made by the
| same people, but it still amuses me to see posts with such
| radically differing views on the front page at the same time)
| vbphprubyjsgo wrote:
| Well congratulations, you are the one person in the world who
| bothered to go dig into the network before opening the page and
| save him one millisecond of CPU time.
| hddherman wrote:
| It might be a conscious decision to support a decentralized
| web. We can't just host everything on the servers of Big Tech
| and act surprised when an outage takes down a huge chunk of the
| web.
| emerongi wrote:
| Using the internet is a showstopper?
| MayeulC wrote:
| Why though? It works for me, the page didn't struggle at all.
| I've seen all sorts of single hosts on underpowered machines
| handling the extra load just fine, as long as it didn't require
| much server-side (static websites). Take the solar-powered
| server from lowtechmagazine for instance.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| These days its harder and harder to know whether someone is
| actually complaining or if they are being sarcastic.
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