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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

#301

Post by jasomill »

pfranz wrote: post #226
jakobegger wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've downloaded Sierra on another Mac before, you can still find the Sierra installer in the Mac App Store in the "Purchases" tab. If you don't have it in your purchases list, you can just ask a friend who has it to download Sierra for you from the Mac App Store. Then you can just copy the Installer app on a thumb drive and run it on your Mac. Only problem might be that maybe you can't download Sierra from a mac…

They stopped doing that with Sierra: "macOS Sierra or later doesn't appear in the Purchased tab. Instead, use the Search field in the upper-right corner to find and open the App Store page for the current version of macOS." https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201272

Note, however, that if[1], and apparently only if[2], you’ve downloaded Sierra from the App Store in the past, you can install

https://github.com/mas-cli/mas

and then use the command

    mas install 1127487414
to download the latest Sierra installer from the App Store.

[1] It worked for me.

[2] Or so I’ve heard.

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

#302

Post by TheKarateKid »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #295
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.

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.

This is why I usually only use man pages to reference a command-line option or as a quick reference. If you're new to a tool, a quick web search finds a much more informative tutorial which saves you time, despite being more verbose.

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

#303

Post by jostmey »

mi100hael wrote: post #145
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…

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,…

Ditto. Our cheap Linux and Windows machine computers are far more stable than our MacBook, which has become a paperweight used to run only one application

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

#304

Post by rcthompson »

Someone wrote: post #268
rcthompson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have pointed out, the password was apparently written in plain text on the disk. So yes, I think a complete erase is warranted.

That can’t be the reason. If you _change_ the password (and use good passwords that are not correlated with each other), an attacker learns nothing from being able to read your old password.

The key is also stored on the disk, encrypted with the password. So presumably an attacker reading the disk could recover the encrypted key and the password and use those to recover the encryption key, which they could then use to decrypt any un-erased fragments of files they find on the disk.

Or something like that. It's an admittedly implausible scenario, but good security is not based on "meh, it probably won't happen". Of course, a much more plausible scenario is password re-use.

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

#306

Post by crispinb »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #302
thaumasiotes wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is why I usually only use man pages to reference a command-line option or as a quick reference. If you're new to a tool, a quick web search finds a much more informative tutorial which saves you time, despite being more verbose.

Quite. And surely this is how pretty much everyone gets started with things like git?

Conversely, novice use of even complex GUI apps rarely requires looking up a tutorial first, because you generally can just click or tap around and at least figure out minimally how to use it.

Inexpert users (ie. nearly everyone) stop there. Obviously further reading is needed to make more extensive and/or efficient use of any tool. But at that point in my opinion we're beyond the reasonable boundaries of 'discoverability'

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

#307

Post by spydum »

exikyut wrote: post #282
KGIII wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most-common complaints that I see about Apple is that they have allowed macOS' quality to steadily decline and the most-common speculation has been that this declination in quality is because macOS makes Apple less money than iOS. The iOS-using products are Apple's cash cow. It does make sense that they'd prioritize working on iOS. However, what doesn't make sense is that Apple certainly has enough resourc…

Manglement seems to have collectively forgotten that iOS app quality is dependent on macOS and tooling quality. Improve macOS, you put a lightness in devs' steps everywhere and iOS apps get even better. It seems that macOS has gotten completely bogged down (like really, really bogged down) and mired in bureaucracy. What I just described is a "little thing" that's very very hard to quantify to non-engineers, sadly. (I…

That last paragraph will seem familiar to anyone running prior versions of Windows... What an ironic turn of events!

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

#308

Post by [deleted] »

Someone wrote: post #28

”Your password might be displayed instead of your password hint if you used the Add APFS Volume command in Disk Utility to create an encrypted APFS volume, and you supplied a password hint. Changing the password on an affected volume clears the hint but doesn’t affect the underlying encryption keys that protect the data.” They go on to advise users to do a backup, format, restore cycle. I guess they are that paranoid…

[deleted]

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

#309

Post by themacguffinman »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #48
nkkollaw wrote: post #24

Apple is really going downhill, in every field. I have a MacBook Pro, and the keys no longer work reliably. I also barely get 2 hours of battery life. High Sierra keeps restarting by itself. They removed the jack, and all ports from laptops. They placed the charger for their wireless mouse under the mouse so you can't use it while charging, and the list goes on and on--particularly with software. It's just not premiu…

> They placed the charger for their wireless mouse under the mouse so you can't use it while charging, and the list goes on and on--particularly with software. Ouch, who let the intern design that one?... Kidding, but really did they not QA test this and how did nobody at QA not say this was a terrible idea? I'll stick to my wireless trackball..

Not that I necessarily agree, but I've heard that Apple intentionally designed it that way because they didn't want users to plug the cord in all the time and effectively make it a wired mouse. They wanted users to actually use the mouse wirelessly as intended.

That certainly seems like a more logical explanation than literally no one at Apple anticipating such an obvious design consequence for a major accessory.

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

#310

Post by Khaine »

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.

I get it regularly with my network backups to my freeBSD server running netatalk
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