vmarks

nhughes said:

rrrize said:

Can't say I don't like the podcast. It's not bad at all.  But it is highly, HIGHLY annoying when one of you is talking and the other cuts in with a thought but no one wants to back down so you both keep talking at the same time, in essence telling the other that you're not going to stop till your thought is complete.  How about just not cutting one another off. Courtesy plays better over audo (podcast).  Quit the annoyingness <-- I know it's not a word.  

Fair point, but I'll note that we are not recording in the same room (let alone the same state). So the whole "talking over each other" thing is sometimes a lag issue, sometimes a miscommunication issue.

And sometimes, (not always, but sometimes) it's a clock sync issue. Clock sync drifts the longer we record, so our responses can be perfectly interleaved at the beginning of the show and be off, talking over each other (even though we weren't) by the end. I make several cuts to adjust it back into line, and I appreciate your patience with it as we record these.

PabloTresUnoSeis said:

Finally.. but the UI is kinda meh. I think Hulu has the best UI for video apps on Apple TV.

The UI is the same as it is on FireTV boxes, minus the advertising for other Amazon products.

Hulu? What?!

Hulu is an abomination, because they've tried to shoehorn too much into it. They'd rather people watch LiveTV through it, although I don't know anyone who does, and they've done this at the expense of making bingewatching harder. If I need to view a list of episodes for a show, it's 5 clicks on the remote to get there. Hulu is not among the top 5, much less the best.

The best part of Hulu is that it works with the TV app so you don't actually have to interact with Hulu.

nhughes said:

randominternetperson said:

What I get out of this article is that one should never inconvenience Neil Hughes in any way, or he will overreact and bring up every incident where you have slighted him and throw them back in your face.

I’ve been doing this for 8 and a half years, and have never, ever written an editorial so harshly criticizing Apple. But yes, never ever inconvenience me, because I’ll overreact at the drop of a hat!

BRB, going to buy loads of hats.

philboogie said:

nhughes said:

I've been the managing editor of AppleInsider for 8 and a half years...

Can you explain the decline in the number of posts? Articles used to get hundreds of replies, but nowadays it seems only every now and then an article receives over 30 posts. Most articles are getting single digit posts, making this site feel like a ghost town. There used to be really great discussions on all things tech, which I always loved to read and participate in.

Apple became successful. 8 years ago, Apple was still the underdog. The iPhone was beginning to get popular, Macs were becoming more prevalent, and Apple fans would congregate at their favorite sites to discuss Apple and all things tech. With Apple's success, the need to have specific places to gather has diminished. You could just as well ask why the MacWorld conference ended, why MacWorld magazine closed up print operations, why MacUser is gone, why MacFixIt is gone, why MacNN is gone, and others I can't recall right now. 

kruegdude said:

nhughes said:

StrangeDays said:

nhughes said:

StrangeDays said:

Hyperbolic piece, our week after Thanksgiving was joyous and without issue on any of our devices? What are we doing wrong??

Guessed the byline by the headline. 

"Major problems did not affect me, therefore they are not major problems."

I said Apple, the company, had a week that was not joyous. By any measure it was a public relations disaster. I am genuinely glad to hear your week was joyous, though.

By the same exact token -- just because some people experienced problems doesn't mean many or most. I've been with family all thru and after Thanksgiving, all Apple devices, and none of us were in a living nightmare because none of us experienced any problems. Sure bugs exist, but the way the techie echo chamber makes it out you'd think everyone's devices were failing everywhere. They aren't. 

If you found out that your front door lock didn't work properly, even though no actually one took advantage of it and broke into your home, would you give the lock company a pass for their mistake? The root bug in macOS is an embarrassment for Apple, and they deserve to be taken to task for it.

My iPhone X was not affected by the iOS 11.1.2 bug, but my wife's was. Took multiple attempts to install the 11.2 update because the springboard kept repeatedly crashing. On any week, that would be a bad bug. On this week, it's the capstone for an unfortunate series of self-inflicted wounds.

Your lock analogy is poor. Most people don’t have their macs out in the open making it available for anyone to access. Also, if they did, it would be locked via a password, you know, the door lock of our macs. 

And I see that your personal device was affected. Sorry to hear that but normally people who have problems with their devices don’t get to pen an entire article in a reputable online magazine riddled with hyperbolic phrasing depicting a sky is falling on us Apple users. Most, as in an extremely large number, of us were not affected by the springboard crash and no one was affected by the root password bug. 

That's the macOS bug - root, the most powerful user your computer can have, more powerful than an admin user, so powerful that Apple has disabled it by default since OS X launched in 2001 - root shipped enabled, without a password. Your computer on High Sierra was open to all, locally and over the network if you had a publicly routable address. If your Mac was out in the open, it was available for anyone to access, regardless of whether or not your user account has a password. Root, the more powerful account, did not have a password. Root is capable of creating, deleting and modifying your admin user without the admin user's password. 

The lock analogy is apt. 

To say that no one was affected by it is a bad presumption. If you rely on knowing with certainty that your computer is secure, the only thing you can do here is erase and reinstall. You simply have no idea what actions were taken if someone remotely accessed your computer with the root account. Essentially, if root is enabled and has no password, your computer is not yours to control. That's not hyperbole. You can suspect that you weren't affected by it and carry on as if nothing happened, but that's you gauging your risk and comfort-level, not being 100% certain to a level that can withstand a security audit that your machine wasn't compromised. 

Last summer, the Mirai botnet compromised a number of webcams and routers which either shipped with a default password in them that could not be changed, or default passwords that the user had not been encouraged to change when setting them up. A Mac root user botnet was possible here, because there was no default password, there was no password at all. 

I know people will think I'm making more out of this bug than there is. I disagree: if you're at all concerned about the security integrity of your machine, the only way to be sure is to erase. If you're interested in security configurations for macOS, https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/APPLE-OS-X-SECURITY-CONFIGURATION is a good place to begin reading.