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Major Snow Leopard Bug Said To Delete User Data
inglishmayjer was one of several readers to send in the news of a major bug in Apple's new OS, 10.6 Snow Leopard, that can wipe out all user data for the administrator account. It is said to be triggered — not every time — by logging in to the Guest account and then back in to the admin account. Some users are reporting that all settings have been reset and most data is gone. The article links to a number of Apple forum threads up to a month old bemoaning the problem. MacFixIt suggests disabling login on the Guest account and, if you need that functionality, creating a non-administrative account named something like Visitor. (The Guest account is special in that its settings are wiped clean after logout.) CNet reports that Apple has acknowledged the bug and is working on a fix.
Would I be a bad person if I were to suggest that this would be a perfect time to upsell Time Capsules to worried Snow Leopard customers?
... and I'm prone to alzheimers!
to all early adopters for beta testing Snow Leopard for me.
... and I'm prone to alzheimers!
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
As far as I can tell, from reading this on other sites, the reproduction involves:
* Machine that was upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard
* Already had the Guest account enabled on Leopard.
* Logs into Guest account (not a remote login but a local, physical login)
* Is hard-booted (after crash, power failure, or power button) from Guest account back into Admin account.
Despite a combination of these steps, people are finding it hard to reproduce. So it's the sort of issue that could fall through the QA cracks.
... and I'm, uhh... who are you again?
I can see the fnords!
Well since the only apparent critics are anon cowards I'll just assume that they are all MS fan boys out to get their cockroach bites while the getting is good.
I don't think it takes a Microsoft fan boy to be critical of a production OS bug that results in complete data loss.
I'm not a fanboi of any particular OS and use all the major ones at home (Win7, Macbook Pro, Ubuntu, Debian, BSD, etc.). They're just tools and they all have their strengths and weaknesses.
But this is a serious bug, and based on the past I'm certain there would be many posts from smug Apple fanbois if it had been a Windows bug. I don't use my Guest account either, but that doesn't mean it would have sucked major ass if I had lost all my data because I did. The user could not possibly predict that just using the Guest account would incur this kind of risk.
It doesn't make sense to be an apologist. I cannot understand why Apple seems to get a free pass from their user community when this sort of thing happens to them. It's not enough to point out that the other developers have problems, too. Get pissed off and help them be better next time.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
I'm not one for the holy wars and I hate to sound like I'm defending Microsoft, but if this happened in Windows, people would be at their door with pitchforks and torches. For sure, no one would be admonishing the users.
See ya, karma. :(
I cannot understand why Apple seems to get a free pass from their user community when this sort of thing happens to them..
Never underestimate the power of shiny.
Leopard and Snow leopard are like Metallica's Load and Re-load: you know it's gonna suck when they start running out of names. I wouldn't be surprised if they named 10.7 "Def Leopard".
They did say that Snow Leopard frees up an extra 7GB for you...
If one thing has been burned into my brain as a programmer, it's this:
Crash all you want, but never, ever, ever harm, corrupt and by all that's holy, NEVER delete the user's data.
The data is sacred. The data is life.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm sorry, but there's no way this should've fallen through QA cracks, because it should not have made it to QA in the first place. This kind of thing should never have been possible in the first place due to a clear segregation of permissions between "Admin" and everything else - particularly "guest".
The fact that this is even possible suggests a much deeper flaw in the security mechanisms of OS X.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
When will software/computer/IT companies be held to the same standards that other engineers (Civil, Electrical, Mechanical) are? If a bridge is built and it collapses due to a poor design, or a gadget catches fire or brakes are poorly designed, people head to their local courthouse and sue.
In the computer world, people just accept that "All my photographs, resume, music, documents, tax returns, whatever" being lost forever is par for the course.
How do you measure the value of data? You can't assign $/KB of data, as one couldn't equate a 20MB Stephen King unpublished manuscript to be equivalent to 4 hi-res pictures of my wife's flower garden. However, I'm not a fan or Stephen King, but my wife loves her flower garden.
Should computers (or electric devices in general) with persistent storage carry a huge warning label on them that says,
"Not guaranteed to maintain data integrity, always back up your data. Use at your own risk."
Yeah, they're definitely doing the guest user account wrong. They should be using tmpfs (or whatever OS X equivalent is) for the guest account. Then they don't have to delete anything, it disappears automatically.
I used to use tmpfs for guest accounts on my ubuntu box for just that reason. That along with encrypted swap files with random keys generated on loading makes "deleting guest data" irrelevant (and lets you resize the temporary device on the fly arbitrarily high by adding more swap if you realize you're going to exceed your available physical ram or allotted space)
You can populate the guest dir from a new-user template, or use unionfs type dealies.
What I did was probably all wrong, but my point remains that you shouldn't have to delete stuff when you're done with the guest account. At the most, you should only have to forget a temporary encryption key, which ought to happen automagically in the event of a hard reboot.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I'm sorry, but there's no way this should've fallen through QA cracks, because it should not have made it to QA in the first place....
So your solution to software quality problems is "don't make mistakes in the first place."? Have you ever released a production-level application before?
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky