Unidentified Developer - The Risk

[Tucom]

So Steam has a massive sale on games right now, and I decided to pick up AC Brotherhood (amazing reviews) for a good deal, for OS X. Ubisoft has the crappiest support and lazy devs for certain things like OS compatibility, and I was one of the many that found out the hard way that it won't launch with Ubi's crappy DRM launcher on anything past 10.6 - so some Googling lead me to an updated version of their launcher, which I installed.

The launcher attempts to launch but is blocked by Apple's Gatekeeper saying it's from an "unidentified developer" - Is there any security risk it letting it run? The download link was this -

http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.ph...bisoft-Game-Launcher-Error-code-4-quot-Forums

From MoshiMoshi - seems to be a Ubi employee. So is it safe?

Really ridiculous you have to jump through hoops just to get a simple game working due to crappy DRM crap!

Oh well, I hope the game is worth it - it's the principle, not the actual effort it took to fix it.

 

[Dark Void]

It's not blocked because it's likely malicious, only because you either have system preferences set to "Mac App store" or "Mac App Store and identified developers" under Security.

Unfortunately, I can't speak to whether that specific file is safe or not, but an unidentified developer can still be trustworthy. You are going to have to read up on comments about the launcher before you download if you are concerned, unless someone on this forum can speak towards that specific install.

I hope this helps.

 

[5aga]

if you have gatekeeper enabled you can always right click the app and click open and it will override Gatekeeper

 

[Tucom]

It's not blocked because it's likely malicious, only because you either have system preferences set to "Mac App store" or "Mac App Store and identified developers" under Security.

Unfortunately, I can't speak to whether that specific file is safe or not, but an unidentified developer can still be trustworthy. You are going to have to read up on comments about the launcher before you download if you are concerned, unless someone on this forum can speak towards that specific install.

I hope this helps.

Thank you - given it was linked by what appeared to be a Ubisoft employee, and the URL appeared to be a legit Ubisoft server, I went ahead and went for it.

What I did was disable Gatekeeper altogether to let it launch, then re-enabled Gatekeeper. For w/e reason I thought this may be safer than right clicking and entering my credentials that way - IDK why lol. But yeah, seems to all be fine.

Thanks again

 

[Partron22]

Used "unidentified developer" stuff for nigh on 25 years.
Never got in much trouble with it.
Perhaps Gatekeeper will keep your granny safer.
I'm not seeing any benefit that outweighs the annoyance.
Turned it off, have not regretted doing so.