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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

#321

Post by smt88 »

jsjohnst wrote: post #221
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,…

I don’t get why engineers let a broken setup hinder them for long periods of time and don’t do a simple google search and spend five minutes fixing their machine. None of your problems you listed are things “broken” and Apple is ignoring, shit happens and sometimes you need to fix it. If you can’t be bothered, take it to the Apple store or give it to your work IT person.

I used desktop Linux for 10 years, and finally I switched to Windows in 2015 because I was tired of "a simple google search and spend five minutes fixing their machine".

At a certain point, you want things to just work out of the box. You want to outsource the mental effort and time required to "just search and fix".

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

#322

Post by TheKarateKid »

KGIII wrote: post #272
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…

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…

iOS' stability and quality have declined as well. I've encountered a number of glitches and bugs on the iPhone that I don't usually expect from Apple.

Some of them are sloppy glitches in functionality or display, others have to do with poor stability (force closing more often). Never encountered any of these issues on iOS a few years ago.

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

#323

Post by Dylan16807 »

j45 wrote: post #316
Dylan16807 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reject that comparison. This is not rewriting a core product with tens of millions of lines of code. This is a small utility program. It's very often no problem to just make a new utility program. Especially one that's in the single digits on how many coder-months it costs.

I don't know if a rewrite is about whether it's large or small, it's about the years of hardening many scenarios.

A simple utility doesn't need that much hardening against corner cases, and in this instance the bug is a main use case.

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

#324

Post by jsjohnst »

smt88 wrote: post #321
jsjohnst wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get why engineers let a broken setup hinder them for long periods of time and don’t do a simple google search and spend five minutes fixing their machine. None of your problems you listed are things “broken” and Apple is ignoring, shit happens and sometimes you need to fix it. If you can’t be bothered, take it to the Apple store or give it to your work IT person.

I used desktop Linux for 10 years, and finally I switched to Windows in 2015 because I was tired of "a simple google search and spend five minutes fixing their machine". At a certain point, you want things to just work out of the box. You want to outsource the mental effort and time required to "just search and fix".

Yes, that’s a great argument for Linux, but much less so for macOS. Apple and Microsoft are roughly comparable these days (and that’s not a compliment to either), but after many years of “next year is the year of the Linux desktop”, Linux is still a pain to install on most consumer hardware in comparison to either macOS or Windows.

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

#325

Post by IncRnd »

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.

You shouldn't accept mediocrity instead of correct software. They are worlds apart.

There is a significant difference between a bug and a severe security error regarding basics.

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

#326

Post by hesarenu »

coleca wrote: post #172
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…

So true. My experience was that upgrading Apple OSes was a safe and reliable experience. I'd almost always upgrade on launch day or the day after. As of the last 2-3 releases that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Their quality assurance has decreased so much that, for productivity sake, I just can't risk it. After the debacle that was the Sierra upgrade (we had all of our users get locked out of their machines af…

High Sierra was a simple upgrade. Nothing seems to be broken for me. Usually some command utlis would be broken.

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

#327

Post by david-cako »

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…

More evidence supporting this: the new Disk Utility.app seemingly has absolutely no way to recover from a fusion drive being split up into an HDD and SSD (made a mistake partitioning it) -- you have to do it from the command line.

On the contrary, I booted the exact same machine into internet recovery (which gave me the Mavericks-era Disk Utility.app) and it literally had a huge warning that the fusion drive was partitioned incorrectly, and a repair button.

Why remove important features that still (have to) exist in the underlying utility? Like this is literally an operating system designed to run on only a handful of hardware, which is why people like it.

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

#328

Post by IncRnd »

jakobegger wrote: post #155
egb wrote: post #2

I so wish Apple had not removed the older Sierra installer from the Mac AppStore... I need to update some machines but High Sierra does not seem ready for reliable use yet.

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…

You've missed the step of looking in the hidden purchases tab. If Sierra was downloaded previously, it is going to be there. There won't be a need to get copies of the software from elsewhere.

In App Store go to Store -> View My Account -> Hidden Items/Manage.

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

#329

Post by IncRnd »

Someone wrote: post #67
adenylyl wrote: post #8

"Erase the affected volume" is really the best solution they could come up with?

I think encryption uses a generated key to encrypt most of the disk, and stores that key encrypted with the user password on the disk. That makes changing the password fast; they only need to re-encrypt the encrypted key with the new password, and write it out. Problem is that an attacker who knows the old password may already have decrypted the generated key, so they can decrypt the encrypted data from the raw data,…

This is called using a KEK (key encryption key) to encrypt a DEK (data encryption key) or a FEK (file encryption key), depending on the exact purpose.

As you point out, erasure can rotate keys. What Apple apparently didn't provide was a straightforward way for key rotation as a key management function. This surely appears to have been rushed to market.

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

#330

Post by duncan_bayne »

I have a number of friends who use OSX and Windows, and keep telling me "just give up on Linux (or FreeBSD) and use something which Just Works!"

Well, except for stuff like this. Or the built-in advertising. Or the VBA code that beachballs in Excel Mac but not Excel Windows. Or the buggy, crashy drivers. Or the awful printing experience. Or the ability to reliably predict behaviour when plugging in external monitors or projectors. Or ...

I _think_ what most people mean by "Just Works" is "I don't have to edit configuration files in order to set up my system", not "my system is reliable and predictable."

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