“Apple has made its Gatekeeper security tool available for customers running the Lion version of its operating system, having previously been one of the main selling points of its Mountain Lion upgrade,” Gareth Morgan reports for V3.
“The security boost comes as the firm also updated its Mountain Lion OS, bringing power nap capabilities to some older models of its MacBook Air and improving Facebook and Game Center integration,” Morgan reports. “The extension of Gatekeeper to Lion users will help keep more Macs safe from the threat of malware, giving users more control over which apps are installed, Apple said.”
Morgan reports, “Apple had originally identified Gatekeeper as a key selling point of its Mountain Lion upgrade. It enables users to set controls over which applications can be installed, potentially limiting installs to ones verified by Apple.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: OS X Lion Update 10.7.5 with Gatekeeper is available via Software Update or as a standalone installer. More info and download link here.
Related articles:
Apple: Mac App Store apps must implement sandboxing by March – November 4, 2011
OS X Mountain Lion’s Gatekeeper slams the door on Mac trojans – February 16, 2012
Now that Mountain Lion is at a .2 release I’m ready to make the switch from Lion.
Yeah, but that’s just in time for Apple to have significantly fixed the Finder in 10.7! 😉
Wow, I thought the same about System 7.0.1 !!
Now if they’d just release iCloud for Leopard and Snow Leopard to make up for the now gone Mobile Me.
+1
Just this week, Gatekeeper refused to let me launch an app because it was from an “Unknown” developer. I was beta testing it for a developer I actually knew. No big deal, I thought, I’ll just add an exception for this developer id or this app specifically, and be on my way.
To my surprise, Gatekeeper has no setting for adding exceptions. The only available option that would let me run the app was to disable Gatekeeper completely! It seemed like a terrible design flaw to me – I can’t run one app without disabling the safety net for all apps?
I guess I’ll leave Gatekeeper turned off until I finish testing the app (and remain vigilant about what I download.) There’s probably a plist file somewhere or an obscure terminal command that will let me add a Gatekeeper exception, but it’s not worth the effort to figure out on my own, and it really shouldn’t require that level of hacking to work in the first place.
Have you tried selecting Open from the contextual menu?
I have not tried that. Why would that be any different than opening it with a double click?
Here is Apple’s definitive doc about Gatekeeper as well as the relevant text. The doc includes illustrations:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5290
How to open an app from a unidentified developer and exempt it from Gatekeeper:
If you are confident the app downloaded from the Internet is the latest version and is from a source you trust, you can open an app from an unidentified developer by following these steps.
Important: Some Apple screened apps from developers that are in the process of acquiring Developer ID signatures will present the “Open” option when they are double-clicked.
Note: In most cases, you will only have to perform these steps once for all user accounts on the Mac:
1) In Finder, Control-click or right click the icon of the app.
2) Select Open from the top of contextual menu that appears.
2) Click Open in the dialog box. If prompted, enter an administrator name and password.
Note: If there is an app that presents multiple Gatekeeper dialog boxes, you can temporarily use Gatekeeper’s “Always” option. Make sure to restore the Gatekeeper option that was there before to bring back Gatekeeper function.
Yeah, I can count. 1, 2, 3.
Okay, that works, but there’s a number of reasons why I don’t like it.
1. Why is the menu option called “Open”? It should be something obvious like “Force Open” or “Open Without Gatekeeper”. I already tried to “open” it by double clicking it in Finder. If this “open” is different, it should be called something different. It’s confusingly inconsistent to make it do something different but call it the same thing.
2. Why are there two different open dialog boxes with different options? It should display the same dialog with the same options, regardless of if I used left click or right click to try to open it.
3. Why was there no mention of this in System Preference? Just below the option to disable Gatekeeper, there could be a blurb saying something like “You can right click on an app and select open to bypass Gatekeeper.” The way it is now, there is simply no way anyone would know to do this unless they read that Apple support article. I think most people in this situation would just disable Gatekeeper, unaware of this hidden option.