First of two articles – this looking at how quarantine works for apps and other executables, details of the flag itself, how it behaves, and more.
quarantine
A simple utility to remove the many quarantine flags which are written when sandboxed apps open movies, PDF, JPEG and other files, and can cause problems.
Do we really need tens of thousands of spurious quarantine flags attached to perfectly good documents?
How the quarantine flag for apps and that for docs opened in sandboxed apps differ, and why there are now so many quarantine flags to trip us up.
Have you noticed quarantine flags appearing on movies and PDFs which have never been downloaded? Here’s a possible explanation.
Apple’s latest information on notarization can appear alarming and contradictory. Do you need to notarize your own apps and scripts? More helpful guidance.
Apple has just warned developers that rules on notarization will change in macOS 10.14.5. Will users be affected?
XProtect’s data files haven’t been updated since 13 March 2018 – a period of 120 days. Is it being replaced in Mojave? What happens to those still using High Sierra and earlier?
The greatest skill in memory is not the remembering, but knowing what to forget – something that macOS is useless at. Why doesn’t it clear out its old crud?
The File menu has been tidied, and xattred can now save the one xattr selected or all of them to a text file.
The Eclectic Light Company 