In my university years, I used to invent such ridiculously overblown phrases for simple things I did, as a form of mockery of corporate culture and my general pastime. But at some point I did realize that these phrases are hashing functions - like the ones you use in a hash table to put objects into buckets. So for a particular thing I do, say "adding colors to terminal applications", I could invent a bunch of nonsense phrases - "enriching the user experience of advanced software", or "delivering visual artistry to professional digital media" or whatnot. It was fun going in this direction, and we'd have a good laugh - but a person seeing just the output could never arrive at my original input, "adding colors to CLI apps". It was one of infinitely many things I could hash under the same phrase, and they could never know which one I did.
So in my eyes, if you're trying to explain something to someone, then using these phrases is essentially equivalent to taking MD5 of what you wanted to say and pasting that hash.
The West has to be wary of becoming a surveillance state. More often than not tech companies in the West are using China tech as an example of how they should operate. We have to protect our civil liberties. I grew up in a post-communist country in Europe, riddled with corruption and dictatorial tendencies, and it is really not a nice place. It's strange that as technology becomes a bigger part of our society, the more it is used against us.
There's no interaction with Gatekeeper there. An executable you've built yourself will just run normally (assuming it has the x attribute of course).
OK, quick lesson in how Gatekeeper works:
When you download a Mac app from the web, or save it from an email, a bit of metadata called the "quarantine attribute" is attached to it. When you try to run an app with the QA, Gatekeeper checks whether it's allowed to run; by default this will be allowed if it's signed. If it doesn't pass GK, you can still run it anyway by right-clicking on it and choosing "Open". When the app runs, regardless of whether GK passed it or you overrode GK, the QA is removed. After that GK no longer cares about it, and the app will just run normally without further fuss.
Safari and Apple Mail automatically add the QA to anything they download, and most 3rd party browsers and email clients now do the same. But if you download an app using most command line tools (curl, wget, ftp, scp, etc), or if you build it yourself from source, then the QA never gets attached to it in the first place, so GK doesn't care about it and the app just runs normally.
As far as I can tell the new notarization system doesn't change any of this, it just adds another form of code signing.
The sad thing for me is that a lot of those strange, eclectic sites are still there, only they became really hard to find. Thanks to Google and other search engines prioritising recency and Brands (with a capital) in all results, the eclectic is penalised to the point of near invisibility.
There was never a point to them, but they were hugely interesting. Today there's no point bothering as it would be gone forever a month after posted to twitter or a Facebook group now bloody everything has to have a stream or timeline. So akin to a chilling effect it invisibly promotes things that have releases. Products.
Nostalgia is some of it I'm sure, but I really do think there's something more concrete there too.
In my university years, I used to invent such ridiculously overblown phrases for simple things I did, as a form of mockery of corporate culture and my general pastime. But at some point I did realize that these phrases are hashing functions - like the ones you use in a hash table to put objects into buckets. So for a particular thing I do, say "adding colors to terminal applications", I could invent a bunch of nonsense phrases - "enriching the user experience of advanced software", or "delivering visual artistry to professional digital media" or whatnot. It was fun going in this direction, and we'd have a good laugh - but a person seeing just the output could never arrive at my original input, "adding colors to CLI apps". It was one of infinitely many things I could hash under the same phrase, and they could never know which one I did.
So in my eyes, if you're trying to explain something to someone, then using these phrases is essentially equivalent to taking MD5 of what you wanted to say and pasting that hash.