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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

#291

Post by brians »

threeseed wrote: post #276
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.)

3. It's just a bug. You know the sort of thing that happens to developers: Every. Single. Day.

Nah. It’s a bug in a critical security system that made it to release. It should have been caught by automated testing—can you grep for the password, or decrypted volume encryption key, in an encrypted filesystem? When you change the password, does anything change other than the encrypted VEK? It shouldn’t!

These are in the first page of tests I’d write. NIST SP 800-111 asks for forensic pre-release testing—can you really believe such happened here?

This isn’t a failure of the engineer who wrote out the wrong buffer. Everyone makes mistakes like that. It’s a failure of the Engineering culture and engineering management that shipped without reasonable testing, or manual pre-release examination. It’s a failure of the culture that accepted bugs like this, rather than asking (appropriately, for an Apple FDE product): let’s assume that it will cost someone $1B or a thousand lives if this fails. What should we do to assure its correctness?

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

#292

Post by VonGuard »

I made the jump off of HFS+ a few months back, as soon as I heard a new FS was coming. After years of keeping TBs of data on Mac OS on HFS+ as a home file server, I was just completely fed up. My external volumes were dead without a Mac. Nothing can read them, without paying for special software, and even that doesn't work correctly.

Now, I know there are many things that can read HFS+ in Linux and Windows, but none of them cover 100%. Sometimes you can't write, sometimes you can't mount on boot, other times you can't rely on it as a long-term solution.

I spent weeks copying everything over to a NAS, and I have never looked back. Apple should have gone with ANYTHING open source, or even remotely open standards, but it seems like the lesson they've taken from Jobs' legacy is "be different for difference's sake."

I know they've open sourced the iOS kernel, but that's because it doesn't matter. It doesn't keep you locked in, like XCode keeps you locked into Mac desktops. The Apple world went from innovating in UI and design, to innovating in supply chain management and pricing structures.

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

#293

Post by brians »

ulfw wrote: post #113
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…

It's the iOSification of OS X. Sadly the whole OS is going in that wrong direction. I would like to know how many folks are working on MacOS vs iOS. Would put things into perspective.

That’s funny. Disk Utility is the successor to Disk First Aid, which has been available since the mid-80s. It’s not the iOSification; it’s deep Mac tradition.

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

#294

Post by bsder »

nier wrote: post #286
mi100hael wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Dell Precision laptop running Linux at home and a MacBook Pro from work. On a weekly basis, the Mac won't wake from sleep and requires a hard reboot. The Time Machine backups get corrupted at least every other month and require a full backup from scratch. Sometimes the audio just quits working when I wake from sleep. The App Store is some horribly wrapped, unresponsive web app. Disk Utility is useless. Etc,…

Every time I had these issues with corrupt Time Machine backups the destination drive had bad blocks. If you have the right drive/interface combination you can use an application called SMART Utility by Volitans to check on that. Time Capsule drives need to be put in compatible enclosures. I would be suspicious of any drive that has even one bad block.

If only there were a modern filesystem that could actually catch these sorts of failures ...

But, hey, here's APFS!

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

#295

Post by thaumasiotes »

crispinb wrote: post #277
davrosthedalek wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that small command-line tools "the unix way" combined with a competently written -h help page is quite discoverable. Maybe not for a general computer newbie, but certainly for people used to /other/ cli tools.

This only seems to work in practise for tools that are very small, otherwise exceptional writing is required (which, by definition, will rarely occur). I can't imagine (to pick a particularly extreme example) that anyone has ever learned to use git by reading the man pages. In contrast, even features in pretty poor GUI apps are by default generally discoverable.

The ssh man page is truly awful. I managed to read through it multiple times without finding the functionality I wanted, even devoting special attention to a section that turned out, later, to be purportedly "documenting" exactly that functionality.

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

#296

Post by lokedhs »

rconti wrote: post #260
nether wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mid-2011 MacBook Air with 4 GB memory has been running really well. Occasionally Safari (the Metal version in High Sierra) gets slow, but it's still faster than Chrome. I've been using it for general casual computing and machine learning development with Jupyter Notebooks and haven't run into anything that would make me want to switch. I'll probably upgrade to a 2018 MacBook Pro with 8 GB memory when those come ou…

Ditto. My 2011 Air is still one of the best machines I've ever bought, and it still gets daily use.

Same. This machine still gets daily use in my house.

The next laptop will not be a Mac though. Both the hardware and especially the software has gotten progressively worse to to point where it's not worth it anymore.

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

#297

Post by kccqzy »

derefr wrote: post #135
BRAlNlAC wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are times that installing macOS requires a trip through Disk Utility, is why. Disk Utility.app is basically made for the single use case of "modify the system to make macOS installable." The thing to understand, is that everyone inside Apple uses diskutil(8), not Disk Utility.app. diskutil(8) is the "canonical" way to do almost everything related to Disk management on macOS, the same way diskmgmt.msc is on Wind…

diskutil(8) is not that great either. Like reading passwords from the terminal without bothering to turn off echo.

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

#298

Post by PhasmaFelis »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #274
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And there's nothing inherently hard about CLI interfaces; "regular people" used MS-DOS PCs for ~two decades. CLIs are opaque by definition. With a GUI you can click around menus until you find what you're looking for; with a CLI you can't even begin unless you already know what you're doing. Man pages are no help to newbies; they're either uselessly terse, impenetrably jargon-packed, or both. It's probably possible…

I would argue that small command-line tools "the unix way" combined with a competently written -h help page is quite discoverable. Maybe not for a general computer newbie, but certainly for people used to /other/ cli tools.

In theory, sure, but I've never seen a competently written -h page.

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

#299

Post by PhasmaFelis »

kemitche wrote: post #288
crispinb wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only seems to work in practise for tools that are very small, otherwise exceptional writing is required (which, by definition, will rarely occur). I can't imagine (to pick a particularly extreme example) that anyone has ever learned to use git by reading the man pages. In contrast, even features in pretty poor GUI apps are by default generally discoverable.

I shudder to think how hard it would be - likely impossible - to use a bad git GUI if I didn't already know many of the git CLI commands. Even just, say, MS Word. If I don't know a feature exists, clicking around through dozens of menus isn't going to get me anywhere. For both CLI and GUI, Google or official docs are the only reasonable way to discover.

> If I don't know a feature exists, clicking around through dozens of menus isn't going to get me anywhere.

I find that clicking around through menus often teaches me about great features I didn't even know I wanted.

Regardless of the cause, in practice, I find that it's much easier to get basic functionality out of a new-to-me GUI app than a CLI app. That may not be a fundamental properly of CLI, but it certainly is how all significant CLIs are written.

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

#300

Post by jasomill »

y3sh wrote: post #235

Why isn't this a 10.13.1 update?

One plausible reason is that they’ve already released a 10.13.1 beta, announced features and API changes coming in 10.13.1, and started revising documentation to reflect changes introduced in 10.13.1, so branding today’s update “10.13.1” would result in a nontrivial amount of extra work and confusion, in exchange for...what, exactly?

The updated version does come with a new full App Store installer and build number (17A405), however, so it’s as easy to install and identify programmatically as a new “point release” would be.

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