Urania Post: SAOImage DS9 versus Leopard Firewall

SAOImage DS9 versus Leopard Firewall

I just found this post on Urania, one of my favorite blogs for finding astro software bug fixes and hearing about updates. This post just happens to be on my new pet topic: Things Leopard Ain’t Doing Right And Thereby Wasting My Time And Money. I encourage you to read the whole post but my summary is that if you want to use DS9 while running Leopard, you have to set your firewall settings to “Allow all incoming connections” and not “Set access for specific services and applications” because Leopard takes it upon itself to digitally sign all applications. DS9 doesn’t like this one bit and the signature ends up completely corrupting the program.

The only way to solve this if it happens to you is to change the firewall settings and reinstall DS9.

The money quote from the post:

MacOS X shouldn’t assume its OK to change an application. In the case of SAOImage DS9, they are irreparably damaging the application without leaving you a way to avoid the damage once you trigger the application firewall.

….

Personally, I believe an application that fails its checksum should present a message indicating that is the problem instead of just crapping out, but in this case, the fault lies mostly with Apple. Apple is damaging applications by making this critical decision in the background, without user intervention!

Amen!