Earlier quoted context omitted.
This statement reveals so much about what's wrong with Microsoft... Good engineering is good user experience.
So many of Google's products prove the contrary.
I surmise that you're misinterpreting the statement.
OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
91–100 of 134 posts
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want an optional feature which only allows the OS to execute MacAppStore programs. This would be "grandparent proof" and would prevent trivial kinds of social engineering used by MacDefender (which targeted clueless users).
If they did this (even as just an option), then there'd be an uproar about how they're incrementally making os x a completely closed system (a walled garden).
They've already done it. It's an option under parental controls.
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steve Jobs certainly looks like a great boss, calling the entire MobileMe team into an all-hands and asking them point blank why the fuck their software doesn't work. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Steve-Jobs-Not-Shy-of-Using-t... we can both play this game all day. user experience is indeed a part of good engineering, but it's not the be-all and end-all, and eventually you will /always/ run into a place where you mu…
Maybe you can shed some light on this doubt I've always had: why does the UAC need to gray/black out all the display? It's such a mess, especially when you have more than one monitor. Is there a technical reason or is it just UX?
This is done to prevent malware faking the prompt and/or user consent. And it's not just "blacking out the display" - the whole thing is executed on another desktop (in OS terms, not in user terms):
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/uac/archive/2006/05/03/589561.aspx
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steve Jobs certainly looks like a great boss, calling the entire MobileMe team into an all-hands and asking them point blank why the fuck their software doesn't work. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Steve-Jobs-Not-Shy-of-Using-t... we can both play this game all day. user experience is indeed a part of good engineering, but it's not the be-all and end-all, and eventually you will /always/ run into a place where you mu…
Maybe you can shed some light on this doubt I've always had: why does the UAC need to gray/black out all the display? It's such a mess, especially when you have more than one monitor. Is there a technical reason or is it just UX?
[deleted]
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#95> The Unix Design is significantly less granular than that of Windows, not even having a basic ACL. The UNIX design came from a time when security was less of an issue and not taken as seriously as it did, and so does the job adequately. Windows NT (and later OSes) were actually designed with security in mind and this shows. This comparison doesn't even make sense, comparing a decades old UNIX design to a comparative…
on a unix server, you have to be root to read everyone's data. on an os x laptop, you can be the logged-in user and read everyone's data. file permissions don't really mean much when everything of importance on the system is owned by one user (which is running dozens of applications with large attack surfaces). that's not really a criticism of mac os, because it's the same on a windows desktop. you need elevated priv…
> on a unix server, you have to be root to read everyone's data.
> on an os x laptop, you can be the logged-in user and read everyone's data
Shenanigans. Unless you have the password of the logged in user, you can't read stuff belonging to other users. Further, if the user in question does not have an Admin account, you're shit out of luck even if you do know their password.
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#96"The Unix Design is significantly less granular than Windows..." That's why it's more secure. Complexity means you don't know what's going on. Complexity means you will forget something. Complexity means there's more likely to be a way to squeeze through, more likely to be a bug, more likely to be a little thing that is forgotten. This is also a problem with complex cryptographic APIs, overly complicated things like…
I'm sorry but this is a horrible argument. Granular security is critical to having a system that can actually be locked down. Which is why SELinux support is built into the kernel now.
And from my experience, most admins turn it off immediately rather than rewriting security policies so that Apache can access data outside of /var/www/, etc. Sure you could modify the policy, but it's enough of a hassle that no one I know has ever done it.
Restrictive security that just gets in people's way is terrible security. Just like forcing people to change their password every 14 days results in people using the same password repeatedly and incrementing a digit on the end (or writing the password down and sticking it on their monitor), creating overly complex rules means that people who absolutely must deal with these things (or who have the time) do so, and everyone else just turns it off and forgets it ever existed.
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you mention specific issues with Unix permission management that Windows solves?
One example: given a file, you can create several different access levels. One group can be read-only, one group can have read and write but NOT delete, one group might only be able to modify permissions, and one group might have full access to the file, while "EVERYONE" has no access at all. Administrators, incidentally, need not have access beyond "take ownership" which is an obvious and easily-audited action. Thes…
And those ACL's are available within OS X as well, as well as within Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD (UFS2 and ZFS).
This complaint doesn't hold water. Those features are available within standard Unix environments (Solaris probably counts the most as a real Unix, OS X is technically certified Unix as well!).
So Unix file permissions can use ACL's. The default is POSIX file permissions but they aren't the only ones available.
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah, this lines up with my external perception as well, and the same is generally true of steveb at Microsoft; the only time I or most of my teammates ever see him is at the Company Meeting every year, and occasionally at engineering town halls. that said, Steve Jobs seems (at least from external appearances) to have far more thorough top-down control over the company's engineering efforts than Steve Ballmer does; t…
Looking in from the outside, I would hazard a guess that Microsoft is more Balkanized than Apple; there are many more products and the successful ones have been around for quite a while, allowing groups to pick up political capital that just isn't available, or rather, is expended differently at Apple.
I've heard a lot of stories of politicking at Microsoft (e.g. the Office project manager didn't want to implement handwriting recognition to add support for tablets, which hurt MS's early tablet OSes).
I compare that to Apple, which seems to have a top-down vision, from which all project behaviours and priorities descend. Lion's adding support for auto-save? You'd better believe that implementing auto-save support into iWork is a top priority, regardless of what the iWork PM thinks about it. That said, Apple seems to rarely hire people who don't share the same vision, and with that comes a certain uniformity of direction that tends to reduce inter-project scuffles.
Also, I get the sense that if (for example) the project manager for iWork was causing unnecessary friction with other teams instead of working with them towards a common goal, he'd be replaced with someone else who's more of a team player.
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#99The blog post wont open on an iPad...
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#100Apple did one thing very well: they ask for a password when doing something potentially harmful, but made sure that the password popup is rare enough that you won't be trained to blindly fill it in. That one thing has more security value than any of the advanced security techniques listed in the article like "stack canaries" and "fine grained ACL". It's too bad there are so many security consultants that focus on the…
However, you only need the password if you want to be root, and most of the stuff malware wants to do (including keylogging, which the article mentions; requiring root to intercept keyboards is only moderately useful if the regular user can gdb -p whatever app has the password field) does not require being root.
If you want to attach a debugger to a program in OS X you are required to be in a developer group, and it will ask you for a password.
