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What a pity, this is exactly the scenario I first expected for Microsoft. But I’m not really surprised that Apple is now ahead, what happened?

The ocsp.apple.com server was apparently down and/or unreachable between yesterday and today¹. Unfortunately macOS tries to reach it every time an app is opened to check if a certificate has expired² or an app has been retracted or some more magic. Of course this is not transparent, closed-source and therefore not verifiable.

The fact that an Apple device can be offline is taken into account and considered as “soft failure”. However, a failure by Apple itself seems to be quite an impossibility and is obviously not considered.

The result is an illustrative example for digital sovereignty: Now the expensive piece of aluminium can only be used as a warming plate for the cat:

By the way: Those who use a personal firewall like LitteSnitch³ or a real one like ipfire.org⁴ can continue to work normally. But no guarantee that this will work in the long run. For sure there are some time limits and undocumented features.