macOS 10.15 Vista • Hacker News Board

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#281

Post by tinus_hn » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 3:30 PM UTC

js2 wrote: post #16

etchalon wrote: post #3

I understand this is chaos, but it's chaos because it has to be. There's no way to move users from an world of opaque "if it's an application, it can do anything it wants" to a world of "applications should ask me when they want to do something" transparency. The idea that Apple doesn't care about the Mac because it's trying to explicitly improve our privacy and security is … weird.

Apple could have figured out a way to coalesce all the individual pop-ups into a single window. I'm sure they considered it and deemed it not worth the effort since this is a one-time pain... of course it's one-time pain shared by millions of users. :-(

It’s not like an overwhelming majority of Mac OS users has configured their machine to auto start a vpn, a virtual machine server and all these fragile utilities.

I doubt any regular user is going to see anywhere near this amount of warnings.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#282

Post by jki275 » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

ohazi wrote: post #123

Maybe we should be angry? Apple has been neglecting OS X since Snow Leopard, thinking that iOS is the only thing worth investing in. Microsoft apparently agrees -- they chopped up the Windows team last year, pushing out the Windows chief and dumping the remaining re-orged husk under Azure. Just for security reasons alone, it should be terrifying that there isn't a standalone Windows group anymore. Windows hasn't been…

Apple has made massive improvements and regular upgrades to macOS since 10.6. I'm not really sure what you are referencing when you say otherwise, but as a Mac user full time at work and at home, you're simply totally wrong.

Windows 10 is quite usable, it's in use all over the world by millions of people. The home versions force a reboot when upgrades are required, but even those upgrades and the associated reboots can be delayed 35 days. The enterprise versions and pro versions can be completely controlled as they should be. Forcing upgrades is probably the best thing MS has ever done for the general security and health of the internet.

Linux is still today a piece of shit, as it has always been.

Apple ships zsh, not bash. If you want an upgraded version of bash you install home-brew and do brew install bash. Done. Or just use zsh because it's better.

If you are an xfce linux on the desktop user, you are very out of touch with modern operating systems.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#283

Post by fulldecent2 » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 3:49 PM UTC

JustFinishedBSG wrote: post #195

trymas wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not long ago DropBox used to show you a fake dialog that then stole your administrator password. Wow. What the hell? Can you provide any sources to read about this more?

https://applehelpwriter.com/2016/07/28/revealing-dropboxs-di... Dropbox imitated a system dialog box in order to get your password to give itself system level permissions without asking you.

Safari is also vulnerable to phishing popups that are indistinguishable from Apple popups.

https://privacylog.blogspot.com/2019/06/safari-zero-day-any-...

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#284

Post by fulldecent2 » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 3:52 PM UTC

013a wrote: post #87

I'm astounded with some of the user security dialogs that Macs display. I got one today: "VSCode wants to make some changes. Deny or Allow." That was the exact wording. Seriously? THIS. BENEFITS. NO. ONE. The only thing I can figure is that, somehow, Mac has required applications to display something to the user to get their permission to make some substantial system-level changes. But the application is, I guess?, a…

Are you using VSCode to access files on remote servers (e.g. using Transmit)?

This breaks in 10.15. Do you have a work around?

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#285

Post by vetinari » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 3:58 PM UTC

deltron3030 wrote: post #271

vetinari wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lenovos have trackpoint; why would you want to use trackpad, when you have the nub?

Trackpoints slow you down, a lot. They're good for more precise work like dragging bezier handles, not so good if you want to navigate UI's imo.

They have acceleration just like mouse has, so moving the cursor is not a problem. For quick scrolling, there is the middle button + nub (granted, this is not easily discoverable).

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#286

Post by cactus2093 » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 4:15 PM UTC

72deluxe wrote: post #212

cactus2093 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if maybe it just stores a settings file in there or something? I've seen similar things with apps that request access to Dropbox or Google Drive just not being scoped granularly enough, so they just ask for access to your entire account to control a single file or folder. Which leads to a shitty situation, either you give up functionality like being able to declaratively override settings and sync them betwe…

Settings should be under ~/Library somewhere (perhaps ~/Library/Preferences?) and not in the Documents directory.

I've seen a number of apps that store settings or presets in Documents. Kind of the same ideas as dotfiles in your home directory, which seems pretty reasonable and I don't think there's one agreed right place for any of this.

A nice benefit of storing them in Documents is that it syncs to icloud automatically even on the free tier, so you can share it between all your computers.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#287

Post by Operyl » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 4:18 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #272

Operyl wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is the Candy Crush installer still in the Start menu? Yup. > Do they still randomly revert telemetry settings on updates? Yup. I've heard that this is a bug? Who knows, I just know I still see it flipping. > What was that thing I read last week about no more local user accounts? It's hidden behind the "Join a Domain" option, or triggers when you're not online. Dark patterns!

> > Is the Candy Crush installer still in the Start menu? > Yup. No. Windows now remembers that you have uninstalled these apps.

Then I guess I hit another bug! The dang thing returned on my last big update.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#288

Post by kbenson » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #104

kbenson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh, let's not forget the fact that Vista was supposed to be Longhorn, the OS of the future with a database file system This sounded interesting when I first heard about it, long before Vista came out. Now when I see it I wonder what they were trying to do. A file system is a database, with a well understood user API. So what were they going to add? Tagging? Application level views of the system? None of t hat seems…

A file system is a database, with a well understood user API. Yes, a terrible API which works poorly for most home use cases. You probably have music on your computer. In your hierarchical filesystem, do you organize it by Genre/Artist/Album or Artist/Album? Do music videos live in the same Artist directory or in a separate "video" folder? Chances are you don't know/care because you're using an app like iTunes that b…

I take it you missed the part where I said " None of t hat seems like something that would require anything more than an extension that handled additional metadata"? I'm not saying don't add additional data that can be fast indexed and trackable, I'm just not sure why it requires a rewrite from the ground up and isn't additional data that is tracked tacked onto the file metadata. I mean, what is that not going to be able to support that just the new metadata would? The difference is whether you also have a hierarchical location stored or not.

The only thing that comes to mind is ACL tracking and it getting a bit complex from different access types, but I can think of a few options to work with that already.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#289

Post by mynameisvlad » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

dpkonofa wrote: post #129

mynameisvlad wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On top of that, this is completely due to the user. What? All the user did was install Catalina and leave it alone for a few hours. How is this all "due to the user"?

Because, in this particular case, the user was using software (Alfred 3) that he knew wasn't going to work right on Catalina prior to upgrading it. Newer versions of Alfred exist that support the newer permissions model in Catalina. He knew that version wasn't fully compatible with Catalina and chose to install it anyways. A normal user isn't going to get that.

Uh, okay. Now explain all the other software requesting permissions:

- Acorn

- HazelHelper

- Plex Media Server

- Keyboard Maestro

- Parallels Access

- Bartender 3

- Arq Agent

- Nextcloud

- Tweetbot

- 1Password

- Spark

- Drafts

- OmniFocus

- Dash

- Bear

- iCloud

If you have dozens of apps asking for permission, then you need to have a better system of displaying those requests than one off popups/notifications.

This is not on the user. Don't victim blame. This is what any other person upgrading would see, maybe not to the same extent but I'm not sure it'd be that far off.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#290

Post by makecheck » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 5:07 PM UTC

dwaite wrote: post #203

makecheck wrote: post #114

It seems to me that for the sake of user experience they should really, really try to automatically coalesce multiple system messages and notifications that appear while others have not yet been dismissed. For example, automatically grow the first alert into a list with checkboxes or something if another alert shows up, so that the user can reply to all of them in a sane way.

The dialogs are meant to be presented in context so that the user understands _why_ they are being asked for a privacy-impacting decision. Applications rely on this so that they may ask for permission within context. E.g., a retail company app that asks to track location permissions on start will often get denied. That same app asking for location permissions when the user says 'find nearest stores' will have decent…

Apple does require apps to provide context in a lot of cases, and the app’s provided reason appears alongside the message.

There is nothing about a combined window that requires context to be lost. For example, add a column that includes trigger conditions and reasons for each one, e.g. “while launching startup item”, “when opening AppName”, “to authorize task performed by AppName”, “downloaded from xyz.com”, etc. If that information really isn’t enough, the user still has the option to deselect one and try it again in isolation.

An API can be held in a modal state without requiring each app to have its own dialog; the system can decide what action allows the API to return to resume the app. Similarly, an app can fire off an async notification without caring if that notification window is separate from others. This is entirely a presentation issue.