The technical side of the Internet is all atwitter about macOS suddenly refusing to launch non-Apple apps. The more excitable elements even suggested some dark plot on Apple’s part:
Tim Cook: “We at Apple believe that privacy is a fundamental human right” [and “privacy” means that all your data is ours] https://t.co/jBbzqwioxZ https://t.co/GJlJrnDOWU
— Sebastian Kübeck (@skuebeck) November 13, 2020
The truth, of course, was far more mundane. Apparently the rush on the part of Mac users to upgrade to Bug Sur, the Mac’s new OS, overwhelmed Apple’s IT infrastructure causing large delays in verifying the trustworthiness of third party apps:
Hey Apple users:
If you’re now experiencing hangs launching apps on the Mac, I figured out the problem using Little Snitch.
It’s trustd connecting to https://t.co/FzIGwbGRan
Denying that connection fixes it, because OCSP is a soft failure.
(Disconnect internet also fixes.) pic.twitter.com/w9YciFltrb
— Jeff Johnson (@lapcatsoftware) November 12, 2020
As suggested in Johnson’s Tweet, the solution is to simply prevent your system from trying to connect to http://ocsp.apple.com until things settle down. The easiest way to do that is to blackhole it in your hosts file. You can find examples of doing that in Johnson’s thread.
I was surprised when I read this because I wasn’t having any problems at all. Then I realized that I very seldom use any third party apps (other than Emacs, of course). Since my Emacs runs virtually all the time, I didn’t have the need to launch it. The TL;DR is that since essentially all my work is done in Emacs and Safari I didn’t realize there was a problem. Yet another reason to put as much as you can into Emacs.