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If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

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Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#241

Post by paultopia »

It does seem like there are a ton of really huge bugs in recent OSX and iOS releases. I just got bitten hard by this bug with dashes in iOS: http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/09/26/tips-turn-off-ios-... -- I've been writing an academic article on my ipad pro, and I just realized that the damn thing ate a ton of my text---whenever the "smart capitalization" feature sees something that looks like an em dash, it inserts a null byte and blows up the end of the string.

How did this thing get through testing without anyone ever typing an em dash?

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#242

Post by Someone »

mikestew wrote: post #184
Someone wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that bug could easily slip through once, even with a test script. Let’s say the script says - enter P as password - enter H as hint - click “OK” - unmount the disk - mount it again - check that the dialog shows the hint H - enter P as the password ... Now, if P isn’t obviously a password and H isn’t obviously a hint (let’s say P is ‘foo’, and H is ‘bar’), it takes only one slip of the mind to turn that “check…

A better test description would use a more password-like value for P (say ‘tqbfjoald’) and a more hint-like value for H (‘quick and brown’), decreasing that risk. Maybe I expect too much, but a tester with any experience is going to use strings like "thePassword" and "theHint" to reduce those brain farts. One doesn't have to test software very long before discovering why using "test", "test" as the respective strings…

I agree it shouldn’t happen, but in this case, the programmer presumably made (more or less) the same mistake, writing out a variable called password unencrypted, possibly after copying it to a variable or structure field called passwordhint.

Thinking of that, this may be an example of a copy-paste bug (https://www.viva64.com/en/a/0068/), where the programmer wrote

   strcpy(&r.password    , &encryptedpassword);
   strcpy(&r.passwordhint, &password);
instead of

   strcpy(&r.password    , &encryptedpassword);
   strcpy(&r.passwordhint, &passwordhint);
(Hopefully using the safer strncpy, but that’s orthogonal to this argument)

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#243

Post by dilap »

derefr wrote: post #220
dilap wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. dont have the same depth of dev talent they used to 2. mgmt that isnt as sensitive-to and focussed-on quality. (this is 75% speculation on my part and 25% confirmed by conversations with 2 ex-apple engineers.)

I've always thought of Apple as one of those black holes that absorbs devs: people land there, and then—if they can hack the culture—tend to stay for their careers. Is this not true any more? Where does ex-Apple dev talent tend to go? (Microsoft? Indie app development?)

Dunno, but it would make sense. Huge apple success post iPhone + exploding tech scene provide a ton of opportunity/temptation to leave.

Anecdotally, Chris Lattner is a high-profile recent departure. :-)

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#244

Post by cjsuk »

lederhosen wrote: post #169
cjsuk wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been abandoned on updates by Motorola or whoever it is owned by on the current whim within a year of buying my G2 and G3 handsets. I don’t feel I can trust them or Google with my cash. Not only that Google makes it difficult to consider your privacy because at every turn there’s a trap. And god forbid one goes wrong because the repair and aftercare service at least in the U.K. is dire. I was told a handset was w…

G2 seems to still get updates if you install LineageOS. My Note2 works beautifully. It is a pity that you have to install it yourself though. On Apple you get updates for as little as 2 years (5s). Neither is good. I would so much prefer buying a phone with vanilla Android and open drivers. But I can still buy an Android phone that I can change batteries and SD-card. One that is not planned to be obsolete.

My wife has a 5 that is 5 years old and has only just stopped getting updates and the battery and storage is fine still.

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#245

Post by cat199 »

jmull wrote: post #204
FabHK wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, if secure/private/whatever you want to call it were encoded in the type system, that would most likely have been caught by the compiler.

It's actually not a very good point because NSSecureTextField inherits from NSTextField and it's specifically designed not to protect from programmatic access to the text. Of course, you can argue about the design but it's still not a dynamic vs. static type issue.

even then:

FooWidget(string s)

and

SecureFooWidget(string s)

could just as easily been confused..

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#246

Post by jmkni »

planetjones wrote: post #50

The lack of attention to detail by Apple recently e.g. code reviews, in house testing is clearly too low. I have seen too many software failures recently from this company. Like photos freezing on my new iMac (before High Sierra), numerous issues with iOS (I remember the podcasts app wasting all my cellular allowance because it ignored WiFi only) and other nuances, inconsistencies and defects. Only in iOS 11 have the…

Wasn’t there a major issue with the designer in the newest version of Xcode? I haven’t upgraded yet but saw this mentioned on Twitter.

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#247

Post by jsz0 »

BRAlNlAC wrote: post #114
thought_alarm wrote: post #49

How did Disk Utility.app go from being one of the great built-in OS X utilities to the embarrassing amateurish shit show that it is today? Perhaps the same people responsible for the file system engineering are also responsible for developing this user-facing application. They might excel at low level system engineering, but they are utterly unqualified to develop a high level GUI application. Spend 5 minutes with th…

I really don't get why they have allowed this crippled GUI for so long. I understand that they want to make it simple for low level users, but that seems like a bad excuse in this case as low level users aren't even going to use Disk Utility, just like they aren't going to use Automater. It shows a blindness to their market, i think. Anybody who is on my "free IT" list for the last few years has been receiving a Mac…

The old version of Disk Utility must have been pretty nasty to justify a full rewrite. I remember it getting quite unreliable at some point around 10.7 when with reading/writing disk images. Partly because the UI relied on non-obvious drag & drop / modifier key mashing to do certain things and it didn't have much error handling to clearly explain what went wrong. It wasn't even that good at explaining what operation you were about to perform. The new version (supplemented by using diskutil for advanced stuff) is an improvement in my opinion.

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#248

Post by jjoonathan »

mi100hael wrote: post #239
jjoonathan wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opposite experience here. 2015 Dell Precision M6800 issues (all non-linux-related have been replicated by >=1 coworker): Spurious thermal throttle activation occasionally reduces performance to molassas Bluescreen in network drivers ~ once a week Unless you disable integrated/discrete graphics switching, it fails to recognize external displays HDD makes strange grinding noise every month or so, but hasn't failed yet.…

I have the newer M5510 and haven't run into any of those issues. HiDPI screen works fine with Gnome scaling, touch screen works, no noises possible from the SSD, fans scale up & down appropriately, battery isn't as good as the Mac but I haven't optimized anything on Linux and it's still several hours, backlight works fine, etc. That's all on the latest release of Fedora (26 IIRC). The land of PC hardware and Linux su…

That's good to know -- as you point out, it's a highly variable function of models/versions, so much so that anecdotal data can actually be useful :)

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#249

Post by eppsilon »

nkkollaw wrote: post #199
Alex3917 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High Sierra keeps restarting by itself. Reset the SMC. It was doing this multiple times per day for me also, but it hasn't been an issue since I did this a couple days ago.

Sure, but I thought these guys were making fun of Windows for having to reinstall every couple of years. I have to reset the SMC or the computer will restart by itself while I'm in the middle of programming..? This is a EUR2000 laptop we're talking about, not a Game Boy.

Is a SMC reset (takes a couple of minutes, max) really equivalent to a complete reinstall of the OS?
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