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Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

davidwalsh.name

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Re: Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

#161

Post by Demigod33 »

samstave wrote: post #135
Demigod33 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if one file was written by a malicious program?

You know =what would be cool: If all apps had to register their pref config files into a single dir and that would be tracked and snapshotted - and then you could just have ALL apps look to the same dir for where their configs come from and you could have a single repo for ALL apps on your or ANY system - and then you could walk up to a terminal and plug in your "license key" which said what apps you had access to an…

> they said it was impossible

What reasons did they name?

Re: Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

#162

Post by robertlutece »

wtetzner wrote: post #87
dustinmoris wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience it's much faster. Just the tiny fraction of a second that it takes me to look at my caps lock key to verify that it's not on takes longer than my fingerprint scan and at that point I haven't even typed a single letter yet :) Also it's arguably not the fastest combination of characters I can type, because my password is not "test1234" and I don't get much opportunity to type it at all anymore since…

> Just the tiny fraction of a second that it takes me to look at my caps lock key to verify that it's not on I always just re-assign the caps-lock key to CTRL.

CTRL when used as a modifier, escape on its own

Re: Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

#163

Post by lucideer »

sigjuice wrote: post #159

What type of work or activity on macOS requires sudo repeatedly enough that it needs to be automated in this way? I mainly need sudo for the occasional dmesg or for adjusting routes after activating my VPN for work.

Not that I install new software all that often, but macports requires sudo for quite a lot of operations.

Re: Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

#164

Post by IgorPartola »

derefr wrote: post #106
jeffbee wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very macOS problem. Why does it reset every preference on updates? The one that kills me is wake-on-lan, that gets turned back on regardless. Hate!

Because, like ChromeOS/CoreOS, modern macOS now does image-based updates. A macOS update isn’t “whatever was previously on your OS volume, plus arbitrary patch X”; rather it’s “a new, fresh OS disk image, written to a separate APFS volume, with a fixed SHA, with update transfer-size optimized by composing said image partially from files in your current OS, but only in such a way that the volume will still hash the sa…

This is an excellent explanation. One last piece to clarify: there is no way to edit the known-safe list, is there? And/or there is no way to add a script after the update process that copies files like this, correct?

Re: Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

#165

Post by IgorPartola »

curt15 wrote: post #124
derefr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, like ChromeOS/CoreOS, modern macOS now does image-based updates. A macOS update isn’t “whatever was previously on your OS volume, plus arbitrary patch X”; rather it’s “a new, fresh OS disk image, written to a separate APFS volume, with a fixed SHA, with update transfer-size optimized by composing said image partially from files in your current OS, but only in such a way that the volume will still hash the sa…

>Unlike ChromeOS/CoreOS, after the first-round SHA verification of the volume, macOS will then patch the new OS-base-image volume with certain files from your current OS-base-image volume, if 1. they’re distinct from the ones it expected to be there, and 2. they appear on a whitelist of known-safe files. Red Hat CoreOS (and other Linux systems managed with OSTree, such as Fedora Silverblue) now do something similar b…

Debian based systems use dpkg which has the option of confold and confnew. Difference is that the default is to ask the user what to do and unattended upgrades default to confold.

Re: Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

#166

Post by Daho0n »

nullserver wrote: post #105
jeffbee wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very macOS problem. Why does it reset every preference on updates? The one that kills me is wake-on-lan, that gets turned back on regardless. Hate!

Back in the day I used to tweak my Linux box, win3.1/95, vim, android phone, etc. endlessly. After awhile they would all become unusable, and I would reinstall everything back to default and try again. Great for leaning, lousy for day to day work. Resetting things back to a known state can make life lot easier. In 10 years I can’t recall needing to reset a Mac.

Because it does so itself. It is even worse to have lost settings than having windows rot. At least in Windows rot is the problem, not the fix.

Re: Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

#167

Post by orf »

samstave wrote: post #158
olyjohn wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just my opinion here, but I feel like Apple again doesn't really care about power users. 98% of their users won't be making any customizations like this, so they don't care to spend money working on those "edge cases." Their primary mission is to sell devices and apps to average people who aren't tech geeks. And I don't think Apple cares about general purpose computing. I see MacOS getting closer to iOS with every up…

Have you ever been FORCED to upgrade/update against your will for a new release whereby you say NO NO NO - then you make the mistake of falling asleep with your phone plugged into the charger to wake to a forced update to your device? Yeah - fuck apple - and fuck Jonny Ive - they claim to be the masers of all aspects of designs, but really they're they masters of /r/assholedesign Their hardware is in the top 70th % -…

That’s a lot of anger and words over something that, in the grand scheme of things, is so utterly unimportant and almost contemptuously irrelevant.

Things are always a trade-off. There are big positives to keeping the ecosystem on a consistent, new and secure version of iOS. Similar positives apply to MacOS.

Re: Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

#170

Post by samstave »

orf wrote: post #167
samstave wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever been FORCED to upgrade/update against your will for a new release whereby you say NO NO NO - then you make the mistake of falling asleep with your phone plugged into the charger to wake to a forced update to your device? Yeah - fuck apple - and fuck Jonny Ive - they claim to be the masers of all aspects of designs, but really they're they masters of /r/assholedesign Their hardware is in the top 70th % -…

That’s a lot of anger and words over something that, in the grand scheme of things, is so utterly unimportant and almost contemptuously irrelevant. Things are always a trade-off. There are big positives to keeping the ecosystem on a consistent, new and secure version of iOS. Similar positives apply to MacOS.

The problem I have with your argument, is you assume that my frustration is just over a single device from Apple.

I have literally had every single apple product since the Apple ][e -- aside from their server systems.

I have had every iPhone (even had pre-launch phones from them) since launch up until I stopped at the 6s+ which is the only phone I will ever own from them.

I have a history with apple that is not shallow and I have had ~35 years of judgement against them.

I recall getting into a talk with a fellow engineer at Lockheed where I said "Trust me, Apple will switch to intel procs - and this apple boi almost had a heart attack saying that would NEVER happen...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_transition_to_Intel_proce ssors

Yeah that happened ~2 years before it actually occured...

(I used to work for intel and have stories about trend prediction there as well...)

So yeah, I'm solid in my position of what I know to have happened...

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