You'll only get the most critical security updates, and only up to a point.

You can block Apple Intelligence and Siri using Screen Time. Configuration profiles and the typical user-facing settings are not likely to go anywhere either.

If you have a Mac, you can supervise devices locally. macOS itself doesn't really have restrictions on payloads (except for Declarations, which mostly are sent by an MDM server). Both Apple Intelligence and Siri can be blocked by Screen Time anyway; it's basically a user-facing interface to apply the same restrictions.

"Somehow" is addressed in my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479348

OFAC sanctions are far more nuanced than what you make them out to be. Very often "general licenses" are carved out for providing IT services or technology to individuals for personal use. The purpose of this is for censorship circumvention, which often supports American interests abroad.

This is not something that you apply for; a general license already applies to everyone. The legalese or restrictions companies use exist because they cannot (or will not) validate everyone is who they say they are. This obviously doesn't apply to companies who deal with controlled exports, where they are responsible for whoever ultimately receives the controlled export.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

https://ofac.treasury.gov/selected-general-licenses-issued-o...

I get this, but you say "very often", but it's not, and generally, looking at OFAC lists, there's only a few countries with personal carveouts (less than 5 of the countries on the list), usually for remittances, and in a few of those countries only to US persons residing there.

Generally the software carveouts are very limited - it's not just "providing IT services or technology to individuals for personal use", i.e. Sudan:

> software updates for medical devices to Sudan

Indeed, of the software carveouts listed on that page, only two are not related to the operation or update of medical devices:

- provision of Internet services to the people of the Ukraine (read: "Starlink")

- provision of messaging services to members of the Government of Venezuela.

No.

Haven't tested this, but try:

System Settings > General > Language & Region > Live Text

"Select text in images to copy or take action."

I understand people don't like this kind of OCR stuff for privacy reasons, but selecting text from images is probably the most useful feature added to iOS in the last ~5 years for me.

It could be even more useful if performed on demand, e.g. long-press on photo region with text.

Isnt that exactly how it works?

From the first message in this thread:

  automatic OCR / processing of all image files on macOS

If OCR was deferred until user request/consent, it would eliminate the battery/performance cost of speculative image analysis.

The first message in the thread isn't the definition of the actual feature.

What's the best way to disable all MacOS image processing background services?

There isn't any such service; it's on demand.

These macOS services appear to be related to image processing:

  photoanalysisd 
  mediaanalysisd
  com.apple.photos.backgroundAnalysisService

It is correct, if somewhat uncommon in daily use. I published an article awhile ago and the editor revised it similarly.

Not entirely. You can selectively remove protections:

csrutil enable --without dtrace

That’s disabling SIP