SIMPLE STEPS

Protect yourself.

Perhaps you find it comforting to believe Apple will look out for you and keep you safe from the horrors of the Internet. Then this is not for you.

Perhaps you've seen through their scam and you're ready to call their bluff, but you don't know the way out. Then this is for you. So read on.

The key to it all is in the command-line tool xattr.

% whereis xattr
/usr/bin/xattr

You don't have xattr on your system? No matter. It's available through Apple, and you can always get it later, but you don't need it now.

But look through this in the meantime.

In its simplest form, xattr can look like this.

% xattr -crsv *

The 'c' clears all XAs. The 'r' means it goes recursive. The 's' means it acts on symlinks themselves rather than their references. And the 'v' stands for 'verbose'.

But that won't pick up 'dotted' files, so you might want to add this.

% xattr -crsv .*

Or, better still, if all your downloads go to your ~/Downloads directory, this will do it all in a single command.

% xattr -crsv ~/Downloads

You could, in theory, keep a small Terminal window open all the time, loaded with that command. Or you could of course make a CLIX command to that effect.

Always cleanse your downloads before Apple's launch services detect them.

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