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Previously Downloaded OS X Installers No Longer Work

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Re: Previously Downloaded OS X Installers No Longer Work

#51

Post by developer2 »

donatj wrote: post #39

I had a handful of apps I use all the time stop working entirely about a week ago. They were purchased from the App Store but are no longer in the App Store. I am furious. I am willing to bet the expired certificate is the culprit. I've had to carefully maintain the .app's myself across a couple Mac's as Apple stopped letting you download things that are no longer in the store. Now they just don't work at all. The ol…

Let's not forget it's not exactly Apple's fault that some developers remove their apps from the App Store. While it's annoying, and we can wish all we want that Apple would make apps permanently available once downloaded, it's really the developer of the app that has failed you, not Apple.

Re: Previously Downloaded OS X Installers No Longer Work

#52

Post by teacup50 »

developer2 wrote: post #51
donatj wrote: post #39

I had a handful of apps I use all the time stop working entirely about a week ago. They were purchased from the App Store but are no longer in the App Store. I am furious. I am willing to bet the expired certificate is the culprit. I've had to carefully maintain the .app's myself across a couple Mac's as Apple stopped letting you download things that are no longer in the store. Now they just don't work at all. The ol…

Let's not forget it's not exactly Apple's fault that some developers remove their apps from the App Store. While it's annoying, and we can wish all we want that Apple would make apps permanently available once downloaded, it's really the developer of the app that has failed you, not Apple.

No, I'm pretty sure it's Apple's DRM that got us into this mess.

Re: Previously Downloaded OS X Installers No Longer Work

#53

Post by r00fus »

username223 wrote: post #38
x0x0 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or TimeMachine "sparsebundle already in use" is the FOAD of error messages. I do love how the (now stale) tools to fix this are maintained by a volunteer on an external site unrelated to apple. I try not to be too grumpy about it, but I paid $3k for a laptop not to have to fucking deal with windows-style normal operation of the OS and related tools is busted and you're gonna sink hours into debugging it. And least wh…

My latest pet peeve is `mds_stores` deciding it needs to spend forever using my iPod, so I can't unplug it without incurring a scolding. It's not hard for Mac OS to stay less terrible to configure than Linux, and less terrible to use than Windows, but that's a low bar.

Do you have your iPod configured in iTunes with "Enable disk use"? Sounds like Spotlight is trying to index it or something...

Re: Previously Downloaded OS X Installers No Longer Work

#54

Post by dcw303 »

> There is one caveat to all this. Apple won’t allow a newer Mac to download versions of OS X that aren’t compatible with that Mac, so on a 27-inch iMac with Retina display, for instance, the App Store app refuses to let you download Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

It's an edge case, but it's still annoying that I can't do this. What if I'm trying to get a non-functional older Mac running again? Stopping all users from doing this does mitigate incompatibility support issues, but it hobbles power users.

To allow this, I don't think they need to add a switch to preferences. I'd be happy with a defaults invocation.

Re: Previously Downloaded OS X Installers No Longer Work

#55

Post by 13thLetter »

x0x0 wrote: post #32
mikeash wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is just awful about providing meaningful, useful errors. The worst is AirPlay. When it fails to connect, which is about 33% of the time, there's nothing. It doesn't even pop up a generic alert, it just silently (or not so silently, if you're playing music) reverts to local playback. Many other examples abound. Most errors at least provide a message, but one so generic as to be useless.

or TimeMachine "sparsebundle already in use" is the FOAD of error messages. I do love how the (now stale) tools to fix this are maintained by a volunteer on an external site unrelated to apple. I try not to be too grumpy about it, but I paid $3k for a laptop not to have to fucking deal with windows-style normal operation of the OS and related tools is busted and you're gonna sink hours into debugging it. And least wh…

I switched from OSX Yosemite to Windows 8.1 a while back.

I have had substantially fewer problems with Windows 8.1.

Re: Previously Downloaded OS X Installers No Longer Work

#56

Post by contingencies »

comex wrote: post #41
contingencies wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

super-fast 2Mbps internet connection Don't complain. Even with torrents and 100Mbps fiber, we max out at 1MB/sec here. It reportedly costs 20,000CNY/month (~USD$4500) for an uninhibited 512k connection out of mainland China, if you can get it. (You generally can't.)

Not that that isn't awful, but 2Mbps is 4 times slower than 1MB/s...

Sure. Actually we rarely get even that, except on domestic transfers. 1MB/sec is best-case, torrent-only scenario ~1-5AM. Makes you value mirror operators.

Re: Previously Downloaded OS X Installers No Longer Work

#57

Post by kevincox »

wangweij wrote: post #47
kevincox wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I didn't realize that. But it still doesn't solve the problem of compromising an old certificate and creating a fake signature with your own time.

Expired and compromised are two different things. If compromised, it will be published in a CRL with a reason flag.

The reason why certificates expire is because they will become easy to crack as computers get faster. So this would effectively be removing the expiry date. Now you can crack any old certificate and sign things claiming that you did it before the certificate expired.

Re: Previously Downloaded OS X Installers No Longer Work

#58

Post by tlrobinson »

flohofwoe wrote: post #22
tlrobinson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Microsoft co-sign the binary or something? If not that feature seems like it would defeat the purpose of expiring certificates.

It means that the certificate was valid at the time of signing. Trying to sign an executable after the certificate has expired will not produce a valid code-signed executable. It totally makes sense. That it is possible to make the certificate valid by simply setting the system clock (this works both on Windows and according to the article, OSX) shows that the whole certificate expiration thing is basically useless.

I'm not sure I understand. It doesn't matter if the consumer of the certificate is able to set their clock to make the certificate/signature valid because most people don't do that, but if the producer of the signature can simply set their clock to produce a signature/timestamp combination that's considered valid by a consumer regardless of their clock, then what's the point of expiring the certificate?

But yeah, it looks like Microsoft countersigns, assuming this is what that original comment was referring to: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb9...

Re: Previously Downloaded OS X Installers No Longer Work

#59

Post by phusion »

contingencies wrote: post #24
filsmick wrote: post #10

I was bitten by this this week. Tried to reuse my installer to install OS X El Capitan on a MBP without redownloading it over my super-fast 2Mbps internet connection. First, I try to install it by just copying the installer app - "can't be verified". Then I make a bootable USB stick using DiskMaker X - "can't be verified". I run an integrity check on the installer - all good. I then try running `/path/to/Install\ OS\…

super-fast 2Mbps internet connection Don't complain. Even with torrents and 100Mbps fiber, we max out at 1MB/sec here. It reportedly costs 20,000CNY/month (~USD$4500) for an uninhibited 512k connection out of mainland China, if you can get it. (You generally can't.)

YOU don't complain, even though it's slow, at least it isn't metered :/

I get 10GB/mo and it's $15 for every GB I go over. I'm a "giant pirate" and would usually go through that in an afternoon when I had comcrap. Oh well.

Re: Previously Downloaded OS X Installers No Longer Work

#60

Post by khedoros »

kevincox wrote: post #33
makomk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It uses trusted timestamping servers run by certificate authorities to sign the timestamp information.

Ok, I didn't realize that. But it still doesn't solve the problem of compromising an old certificate and creating a fake signature with your own time.

A timestamp authority is trusted in the same way that a certificate signing authority is, so you'd have to compromise a timestamp authority as well as the private keys paired with the certificate. A self-timestamped file would have the same level of trust as a file signed with a self-signed certificate.
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