111–120 of 261 posts
My work Mac regularly pops up an alert box claiming that Slack is “trying to install a new helper tool”. I have no idea why or what it means. I asked IT how I could verify it was legit and they didn’t know. I often wonder if this could also be exploited because it asks for a password and it keeps popping back up every time I click cancel.
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I mean, a website could display a crafty popup-appearing box and try to get you to type in your username and password. Not really sure how you can prevent that. Vista used the “the background dims quite a bit” to try to deal with that.
I just told you how… it would show your special icon or phrase inside so you’d confirm it before you typed anything. The phrase would be managed through a system screen, like a login screen
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The one that I find really obnoxious is granting permission to read from a “removable” drive. Like the one my steam library lives on.
How often do you face that? I would think the OS would save your response in a way it could refer back to.
man, i think this really is the last time im buying Apple products, the string of CVEs, the many issues with hardware, iPhone as well....im over the hype and switching to Android and Windows I miss being able to play games. I miss having a phone without lock-ins and security vulnerabilities that do not get patched.
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Out of curiosity, what do you find annoying about it?
Oh god, don't get me started... 1. iCloud nags never go away if you don't log into iCloud 2. Apple Music is just an advertisement by default and "conveniently" opens every sound file mimetype 3. Functionally useless subscription slopware like AppleTV+ comes installed by-default for no reason 4. Package management is a colossal clusterfuck that can't even enforce package parity across system architectures 5. Apple sti…
My work Mac regularly pops up an alert box claiming that Slack is “trying to install a new helper tool”. I have no idea why or what it means. I asked IT how I could verify it was legit and they didn’t know. I often wonder if this could also be exploited because it asks for a password and it keeps popping back up every time I click cancel.
I've been ignoring both for literally years.
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How often do you face that? I would think the OS would save your response in a way it could refer back to.
Frequently. The problem is it’s per app not per drive . I had my entire homedir on there for a while but the prompts just got to be too obnoxious.
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I bet threat actors are just salivating at the thought of giving you a fake password prompt.
Yeah. I am very hygienic at work in terms of what sites I visit but you can never be too careful. To me the main threat vector is my dev curiosity!
man, i think this really is the last time im buying Apple products, the string of CVEs, the many issues with hardware, iPhone as well....im over the hype and switching to Android and Windows I miss being able to play games. I miss having a phone without lock-ins and security vulnerabilities that do not get patched.
Oh you're going to _hate_ Windows - I say this as someone who switched in the last 2 years. MacOS can be very annoying, Windows is just one big advertisement these days in a badly skinned window manager.
On the off-chance someone at Apple reads this, I'll repeat my perennial beg that Apple stops popping up 'Give me your (local admin) password right now' dialogs randomly throughout the day because the computer has a hankering to install updates or something. Anyone with basic skills can whip up a convincing replica of that popup on the Web, and the "bottom 80%" (at least) of users in technical savvy would not think to…
The thing I hate about these things is I have no idea why they’re asking this, and no idea what happens if I say No, even how to “manage” these settings should I wish to change it. The UX is different from the apps saying “Hey, open the preferences panel and give us XXX” and there you can see the app, the capability toggle, decide to turn it on, or even go back to turn it back off. These experiences have been why I’v…
I don't think the UX has to be awful. The problem is just that they're kinda half baked on macos, and bolted on, and not really a first class citizen. There's no reason you couldn't have:
- A preferences dialog showing which long-lived capabilities you've granted to which application. (Which is almost exactly what the accessibility preferences pane already is.) Ideally this UI could have a log of ways in which the application has used that capability recently and the ability to revoke it. Maybe even the ability to review the app's use of the capability. Show the review score to other users when the app asks for the permission.
- A little blob of text saying why the application is asking for the specified permission. iOS requires this from all 3rd party apps. So its kinda weird that MacOS is missing explanatory text entirely on these popups.
- Clear indication of what would happen if you said no.
- Interdiction. In a good capability systems (eg SeL4), a capability object doesn't tell you what you can do with it. Eg, you can't ask a file handle which file its actually associated with. This means you can craft your own "virtual" capability which fakes the expected behaviour and pass that to an app instead. Any calls made using the capability come to you. Whenever phone apps ask for access to my contact address book, I'd love to be able to say yes, but give them access to like 100mb of fake entries instead.
- And on top of interdiction: logging, call whitelisting, "Little snitch", etc.
- More fine grained capabilities. I don't want to give any app a "root my computer" capability. I don't want that to be a thing applications ever need or get access to.
I think macos's problem is that its trying to bolt on capabilities after the fact. POSIX isn't built around capabilities. As a result, app developers don't think in terms of capabilities, and they expect their apps (new and old) to work without them. In a real capability based OS, fopen() should probably take a capability as a parameter. But making that change would require changing just about every program ever written for the platform. And modifying the standard library of all programming languages.