Hi again Paul, I am home and dry, about to try the uninstallation.
I was just reading back to refresh my memory on your excellent advice here, I noticed your forum profile says you have VMs running on Linux, Windows and MacOSX! I didn't even know you could run a virtual session of MacOSX! That got me thinking, and i wondered if you had any thoughts as you clearly know your stuff...
I am heavily into privacy. Without boring you as to the reasons why, I distrust apple much more than I used to. I have reason, not paranoia, including friends in a position to know certain things most of us aren't. One of those friends reliably informs me that Apple stores a LOT of data on users, hence why they agreed with China's CCP to store all Chinese user's data (in particular encryption keys and keychain/icloud data) on servers physically located in China, where they can be got at quite easily with a warrant, where warrants in China can be scribbled out by a Police Officer and executed without so much as a nod from another party (i.e. a judge). Ever since Catalina (which I have never used), which saw the beginnings of what are in my view Apple's moves much more towards the Windows model of storing as much data on users as possible, although in apple's case making that ONLY available to Apple (and govt debatably) rather than tons of 3rd party advertisers and purchasers, I have sought to protect myself more and more from the huge amount of connections and data transmissions from OSX to Apple servers (and others). Then came Big Slur and once I looked into that, I have sadly decided to slowly move to Linux. By the time my OSX (Mojave) is no longer supported, I expect to be using Linux full time. But that's a big ask for me, not being a dev type!
I have run Little Snitch for many years, just to avoid spyware and unwanted connections from installed programs, checking for updates, reporting my location, habits, browsing history etc etc. But recently I have begun to try to use it to block as many Apple connections as possible too. I don't use icloud, apple email addresses, maps, itunes store, photo sharing, cloud backups, find my mac, or anything else I can easily avoid using open source alternatives where needed. I also don't store any passwords in icloud/keychain. I found with Mojave they made a sneaky move which, whilst I am technical enough to be able to fully confirm, I feel quite sure just from my testing, that Apple are storing disk encryption passwords. Of course they offer to do that for convenience, such as storing in online keychain. But I don't want them storing it, and that was never a problem with High Sierra or prior, but since Mojave a restore to a new machine turns off filevault, forcing users to encrypt their data AFTER setting up the user account. Having researched a lot of what goes on in China (with Apple especially), I BELIEVE this is a neat trick to push people into entering their disk encryption key AFTER logging in, rather than before, thus making it available to Apple. I am sure many will not believe this, and I am not looking to debate it, and of course it may not be the case. But I am at this point quite convinced that they do so.
For my last restore I found a way around it, but it won't be around much longer. I keep clones and TM backups, but I also keep a clone of my last High Sierra clone. I found that I can use that to clone to any mac (newer ones for instance), then manually migrate the rest of my data from more recent (Mojave) clones/backups. By doing it that way, the HS install/restore can be done on a HDD which is manually encrypted during formatting, AND the restore doesn't turn it off (turning FileVault off). So for instance my machine I am using here now, when I power it on or restart, it asks for a disk encryption key BEFORE any users are anywhere near loaded. It takes a fair while (5 minutes just to decrypt and offer logins), but I THINK that means my encryption key isn't ABLE to be passed to apple even if they are doing anything like that. It's extemely hard to explain exactly what I mean, but I spent 1-2 WEEKS solid, cloning and restoring, using different versions of OSX, and I am fairly sure I both found the 'trick' going on, and a way to avoid it. I could of course be wrong, but since I believe this, I will continue as if it's true
I have noticed my Mac is running slower than it should, especially after boot up. I am wondering if this is because loads of processes are running (hammering the CPU usage in ActMon) but Little Snitch is blocking the connections, meaning the processes hammer my machine much longer than they normally would if they had the connections they want to Apple. The problem is that Apple is deliberately making things difficult, and that's in Mojave. It's pretty much impossible in Big Sur. For instance they tie processes to more than one purpose, so if you want to block one thing (for instance iTunes store, or PhotoLibrary "analysis") it will also block something else which can't be blocked without harming the running of the OS, for instance Gatekeeper checks. In other examples the servers you have to block are needed for both essential things, AND spurious privacy invasive things which I want to block but can't.
So, long story short... I found this -
https://gist.github.com/pwnsdx/1217727c ... fdd7a0fc21
I am not quite confident enough with Terminal to run it, and that really bugs me as I would love to try it but my machine is used for business stuff and a lot of personal stuff too, so I can't chance it in case I do something wrong. Which leads me to the beginning! If you can run OSX in a VM, maybe that would be a neat way to play around and see how the OS runs with that script blocking all those nasties!!
Do you have any knowledge of that script, or of blocking any of these processes it blocks, manually like that? I don't even know how to run it, github is designed for people who understand not only code, but github itself too! I understand neither! I have used Terminal a fair bit, but not confidently!
I have installers for the last 6 or 7 Apple OSX versions (except Big Slur as I don't even want the installer for that
), is it just a case of starting a new VM and running one of those, and then I will have Mac OSX inside Max OSX? If so, great! I will have to give that a whirl!!
Thanks again for all your help above. I am off to try and uninstall VB and reinstall