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~/.osx updated — sensible hacker defaults for OS X Mountain Lion

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Re: ~/.osx updated — sensible hacker defaults for OS X Mountain Lion

#31

Post by msbarnett »

philwelch wrote: post #29
msbarnett wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not buggy, that's a text file with it's executable bit set, which is actually potentially dangerous.

Not if you're opening it in a text editor.

There's no way for LaunchServices to know, a priori, whether a given executable file's default app is going to perform a safe editing operation, or execute its contents.

Now, you could hardcode a list of "safe" apps, or add some kind of "I swear I'm safe" declaration to the app's plist, but that has its own set of problems. A one-time "this seems funky to me, are you actually intending to do this?" is a simple and safe default.

Re: ~/.osx updated — sensible hacker defaults for OS X Mountain Lion

#32

Post by lparry »

pooriaazimi wrote: post #6

This is the most important one, that's not been mentioned in OP: defaults write -g NSScrollAnimationEnabled -bool NO It disables the stupid "smooth scrolling". on Lion (and everything before that) you could disable it from the 'General' tab of SysPrefs, but now it's gone. What does it do? When you press spacebar in a web browser, or fn-downarrow in a text editor, it "smoothly" bring new content up from the bottom of…

I'm completely the opposite; having windows contents jarrigly jump down slows me down significantly as I keep having to scan to find my place. It's one thing that annoys me about vimium that there's no option to j/k scroll smoothly

Re: ~/.osx updated — sensible hacker defaults for OS X Mountain Lion

#33

Post by jkbr »

This:

    # Finder: allow text selection in Quick Look
    defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool true
Combined with "Use OSX Finder Quicklook (Spacebar) to preview all plain text files"[1] is pretty useful.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4230594

Re: ~/.osx updated — sensible hacker defaults for OS X Mountain Lion

#34

Post by FaceKicker »

msbarnett wrote: post #31
philwelch wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you're opening it in a text editor.

There's no way for LaunchServices to know, a priori, whether a given executable file's default app is going to perform a safe editing operation, or execute its contents. Now, you could hardcode a list of "safe" apps, or add some kind of "I swear I'm safe" declaration to the app's plist, but that has its own set of problems. A one-time "this seems funky to me, are you actually intending to do this?" is a simple and sa…

> There's no way for LaunchServices to know, a priori, whether a given executable file's default app is going to perform a safe editing operation, or execute its contents.

But in that sense an executable file isn't any different from a non-executable file, is it? The default app for the file could do equally dangerous things with a non-executable.

Re: ~/.osx updated — sensible hacker defaults for OS X Mountain Lion

#35

Post by jimktrains2 »

msbarnett wrote: post #31
philwelch wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you're opening it in a text editor.

There's no way for LaunchServices to know, a priori, whether a given executable file's default app is going to perform a safe editing operation, or execute its contents. Now, you could hardcode a list of "safe" apps, or add some kind of "I swear I'm safe" declaration to the app's plist, but that has its own set of problems. A one-time "this seems funky to me, are you actually intending to do this?" is a simple and sa…

But the application doesn't _need_ to execute the contents for bad stuff to happen viz jpg and pdf encoder exploits.

Also, how many applications actually _execute_ (bare machine, vm's don't count) content? My guess is that few if any of the applications a user opens that isn't executed by finder itself is going to execute the file's contents.

Re: ~/.osx updated — sensible hacker defaults for OS X Mountain Lion

#37

Post by radley »

msbarnett wrote: post #11

defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool false This is a terrible idea. If your browser, or anything else, is ever conned into downloading and opening a file, the quarantine is the difference between "what the fuck, why is an executable I've never launched before trying to launch?" and silently getting owned.

Sorry - this is total security theater.

I download almost everything from the net - how else would I install? CD? Floppy? Telling me that it's downloaded from the internet doesn't do anything to identify that it's dangerous and so I ignore the warning.

Under what circumstance would I go "whoa, maybe it's dangerous this time"???

Mac's don't have auto-install .exe files. Yet we get warning for everything from JPEGs to TXT to DMG. Ridiculous.

Re: ~/.osx updated — sensible hacker defaults for OS X Mountain Lion

#38

Post by radley »

stevencorona wrote: post #36

I don't think I'd like this at all. What's the point of disabling animations, system-wide resume, not letting the OS terminate inactive apps, etc?

Animations take time and get old fast.

Terminating inactive apps doesn't work right. Often you'll try to reopen an app (such as Preview) and it's stuck: finder thinks it's already open but it's not. So you have to force close it and reopen it.

There's a lot of ideas in Lion & MLion that clearly should never have passed if there was a tasteful gatekeeper at the helm, but now everyone's a UX expert and it's a sloppy, half-baked mess of random, unchangeable preferences.

Re: ~/.osx updated — sensible hacker defaults for OS X Mountain Lion

#39

Post by jasomill »

thought_alarm wrote: post #21
msbarnett wrote: post #11

defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool false This is a terrible idea. If your browser, or anything else, is ever conned into downloading and opening a file, the quarantine is the difference between "what the fuck, why is an executable I've never launched before trying to launch?" and silently getting owned.

I would love to not have to disable this, but it's buggy and I've had it up to here with pointless confirmations like "README.txt is an application downloaded from the internet. Are you sure you want to open this file in TextEdit?"

  jtm@socrates ~ $ cat ~/Local/bin/unquarantine
  #!/bin/sh
  for i in com.apple.metadata:kMDItemDownloadedDate \
           com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms \
           com.apple.quarantine; do
      xattr -r -d $i "$@"
  done

Re: ~/.osx updated — sensible hacker defaults for OS X Mountain Lion

#40

Post by pooriaazimi »

lparry wrote: post #32
pooriaazimi wrote: post #6

This is the most important one, that's not been mentioned in OP: defaults write -g NSScrollAnimationEnabled -bool NO It disables the stupid "smooth scrolling". on Lion (and everything before that) you could disable it from the 'General' tab of SysPrefs, but now it's gone. What does it do? When you press spacebar in a web browser, or fn-downarrow in a text editor, it "smoothly" bring new content up from the bottom of…

I'm completely the opposite; having windows contents jarrigly jump down slows me down significantly as I keep having to scan to find my place. It's one thing that annoys me about vimium that there's no option to j/k scroll smoothly

I would love it too, if it wasn't 8 frames per second on my machine! I love animations, but this one is ridiculously slow on my machine...
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