Apple Releases macOS Mojave Featuring Dark Mode and Other Features; Earlier Today a Security Researcher Published 0Day Bypass For a Privacy Bug in the new OS

Apple on Monday made available to the public macOS Mojave -- aka macOS 10.14, the latest major update to its desktop operating system. From a report: Though Mojave is substantially focused on under-the-hood improvements, it includes several major changes to the Mac's Finder, as well as a small collection of apps that were ported from iOS. On the Finder side, Apple has introduced a system-wide Dark Mode, which optionally reskins the entire user interface with black or dark gray elements. Dark Mode pairs up with Dynamic Desktop, which can automatically adjust certain desktop images in sync with time of day (morning, afternoon, and evening) changes. Minutes ahead of the release, Patrick Wardle, chief researcher officer at Digita Security, tweeted a video of an apparent privacy feature bypass that's designed to prevent apps from improperly accessing a user's personal data. From a report: For years, Macs have forced apps to ask for permission before accessing your contacts and calendar after some iOS apps were caught uploading private data. Apple said at its annual developer conference this year that it would expand the feature to include apps asking for permission to access the camera, microphone, email and backups. Wardle told TechCrunch that his findings are "not a universal bypass" of the feature, but that the bug could allow a malicious app to grab certain protected data, such as a user's contacts, when a user is logged in.

Comments

Is that a title or summary?

[Anonymous Coward]

I barely got through the title before I needed a rest.

Re:Is that a title or summary?

[Austerity Empowers]

They had to get the obligatory Apple slam in there and put the 'M$' in msmash

Re:Is that a title or summary?

[Darinbob]

I was dozing off too, but then I perked up when I heard that my rest home was having applesauce for lunch!

LOL fuck apple

[Anonymous Coward]

better double down on security and writing stable code apple.

A nice stability/speed release

[SuperKendall]

I'm pretty happy that Apple occasionally does releases meant more to improve speed and stability than just pile on features.

This is one of those releases, it makes my older MacBook Pro feel a bit faster, especially along with improvements to speed made in Xcode 10.

Re:A nice stability/speed release

[ctilsie242]

I respect any company that can take a step and have a major code iteration be a refactor. I don't mind having a release just be bug fixes and security improvements. That to me, is more important than new features.

Re:A nice stability/speed release

[TheFakeTimCook]

I respect any company that can take a step and have a major code iteration be a refactor. I don't mind having a release just be bug fixes and security improvements. That to me, is more important than new features.

At this point in the game, it is.

Re:A nice stability/speed release

[magusxxx]

I can't believe people are excited over the time-of-day screen saver. About 20 years ago there was a program called Sundial which did exactly the same thing.

Tired of Dark Themes now I can't get rid of them!

[jellomizer]

Windows 10, Most Linux Distibutions, and now OS X all seem to like this Dark theme. It was cool for a while, but trying to install a Light Theme is nearly impossible now, and all new apps seems to want to use it as well.

Sure it looks all Sci-Fi. but in a retro way.

Re:Why?!

[omnichad]

OS 9.x was way more buggy than you remember. Being built on bsd code makes OS X way more stable (at least after 10.2). Now, it may have reached its peak somewhere between Snow Leopard and Lion, but that's another debate. Breaking compatibility with their own pro apps just to force you to their app store versions is one of the worse things to come since.

Wrong source

[SuperKendall]

Yeah, who cares if it uploads all your contacts to anyone who asks for it?

IDK, why not ask every Android user?

BURN

macOS 9.x is gone, we can cheer

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to use Macs in the 9.xx days. Cooperative multitasking, where one program could completely hang the system unless it calls WaitNextEvent() resulted in a relatively unstable OS build, especially if you used a lot of programs. I remember having to restart constantly, to the point where when I needed to change tasks, I restarted.

OS X is far more stable. One crappy app can be killed, and life move on.

Re:macOS 9.x is gone, we can cheer

[Etcetera]

I used to use Macs in the 9.xx days. Cooperative multitasking, where one program could completely hang the system unless it calls WaitNextEvent() resulted in a relatively unstable OS build, especially if you used a lot of programs.

I don't know... Thinking back on things, I'd actually say that I tended to have *more* applications (though not background services) running at a time then than I do now, but that's partly because the promise of the Browser-As-Platform is way more a possibility now than then.

I had been a Mac user since System 6 though, and I think Mac OS 8.6 was actually pretty damn stable for me. Cooperative multitasking can't fight against application bugs, but the generally slower rate of change for apps meant that those with bugs were more liable to be identified. Of course, flaky extensions could still ruin your day, but that was really always the case, and we all knew that things like Kalidescope could cause problems.

On the whole, I suspect apps' requirement for WNE loops (or, heaven forbid, GNE) forced some to always consider the need to relinquish control on a shared system. Nowadays it feels like apps ignore that complete and demand the kernel figure it out -- safer, no doubt, but I'm not sure it's completely *better*.

In any event, I left Mac world just as the OS X made it from Rhapsody to release, and after ages in Windows/Linux re-introduced myself to it in 2011. A different world. Not better; just meeting different needs.

Re:macOS 9.x is gone, we can cheer

[Megane]

The best part for me was how you had to wait nine whole seconds after waking up your laptop before you could do anything with it. This was because the Open Transport networking sat around twiddling its fingers. I installed OS X Public Beta, and it let me use my laptop right away. But it also ran the battery down because it didn't sleep all the hardware properly. So OS X really did "broke my mac", because they hadn't learned yet to stop trickle charging until the battery went below 95%. The battery was dead in a year.

Re:macOS 9.x is gone, we can cheer

[Megane]

That was Macsbug, a machine-language monitor. I would hardly call that a "command line mode", since all it let you do was examine and change the CPU registers.

Re:Why?!

[TheFakeTimCook]

Apple OS 9.xx was perfectly adequate. I was happy with it. Installing OS X broke my mac. I had to reinstall os 9.

All this fancy OS X is nothing but bloat. The kind of bloat some busy body brown noser thinks is a good idea at a mon day morning office meeting. Bloat to create useless programmer jobs equivalent to " téléphone desanatiser " or "management consultant" of Hitchhikers Guide.

Bloat designed to support bloated websites full of memory/CPU cl9gging advertisement.

This is too much. I'm finished. Apple boycott for life

You're an illiterate, COWARDLY idiot.

GTFO.

Re:Tired of Dark Themes now I can't get rid of the

[dgood]

Come on, you didn't even need to RTA! It's right there in the summary:

system-wide Dark Mode, which optionally reskins the entire user interface with black or dark gray elements

If you don't want Dark Mode, just turn it off. You don't have to install a "Light Theme".

Re:Tired of Dark Themes now I can't get rid of the

[ThomasD3]

you don't have to turn it off, you just have to not turn it on

Dark mode for the web

[cerberusss]

If you have Firefox on the mac, check out this extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

It basically allows you to darkify (is that a word?) all websites. ALL of them. It has a slider if you want to play with the intensity of the darkifying. You can exclude certain sites, of course. With a whitelist. Yea no, I'm not kidding, it's called a whitelist.

Re:Tired of Dark Themes now I can't get rid of the

[DontBeAMoran]

Also, AFAIK, Apple's dark mode is not "everything dark all the time" but instead adjusts your desktop and apps according to the time of day. Light during the day, darker in the evening and dark during night time.

Re:SuperBlathering Ken Doll blathers nothings agai

[TheFakeTimCook]

apple gives away the OS because YOU are the product!

PROVE it, or GTFO!!!

So that's what this year's fashion will be.

[Chelloveck]

"Dark" is the new "flat". Can't wait for green text to become all the rage, too.

Touting themes...in 2018?

[oogoliegoogolie]

Did some project manager at Apple fire up their 25-year old 486 running Windows 3.1, play with theme settings, and think "How can we market this today"?

Apple really is running out of ideas.

Installed .. it's faster, but Dark Mode naaaaaaaa

[niks42]

Dark Mode lasted about three minutes. It's garbage and hurt my eyes.

Give me proper skins like Gnome.

Re:Why?!

[Applehu Akbar]

OS X is built on Unix. OS 9 was built on being pointlessly different from Windows.

It's like déjà vu all over again!

[Hallux-F-Sinister]

This reminds me of that time that Apple released a version of iMacOSx that allowed people to gain root by just pressing enter with no password.

I love Apple's new beta-testing program... where they release beta software as if it's release-ready, to find the bugs they used to find and crush BEFORE releasing their new OS to the general user populace.

Re:Dark Mode? Seriously?

[Megane]

Considering that Apple has changed the main OS theme skin in every other release, without any option to use the old one, I'd say that was headline news. Two themes at the same time? What's next, UI sound effects?

Re:Installed .. it's faster, but Dark Mode naaaaaa

[Megane]

At night I prefer to just set my backlight to minimum level. The only thing worse than dark mode is forced dark mode. I have made custom CSS for a couple of web sites I regularly read (one of them is Hackaday) to override that eye cancer.