I think that "I don't want to see/hear it" seems to be a defence, give that we have laws decreeing what may be shown and said on television. You couldn't protest censorship laws by putting on an advertisement showing goatse.cx on mainstream TV in the middle of the day, regardless of whether the broadcaster was prepared to do it.
I live in Britain, and it seems we are getting more and more of a cotton-wool society these days...
Don't think Stalin's gulags and Hitler's gestapo. Think Orwell's Big Brother and Corporate Personhood. That's why the second amendment isn't worth the paper it's written on.
Hell, it doesn't even have to be consistent. Americans seem to understand their crazy "middling significant then least significant then most significant" date ordering system, even if it bemuses the hell out the rest of the civilised world.
by default OSX gives you no room for customization, you're practically expected and heavily advised to use the stock proprietary software and they'll try their damnedest to lock any third party stuff out of what they can. WTF? You must have missed the fact that XCode and all the other development tools come for free.
I hope you were being tongue in cheek about remote driving: start with a boring job, add latency, take away direct personal consequence, and you have a recipe for disaster!
I think that for similar reasons IT jobs will continue to be performed onsite -- communication, including giving someone a bollocking, is much easier face to face.
Most of the places that dialog pops up for me are to unlock Preferences and to unlock my keychain, or to run an application with elevated privilege, or to authenticate Finder to copy a file to (for example) another user account. The keychain password dialog is (and looks) different, but your point is taken. However, authenticating Finder or System Preferences is a bit different. Imagine you were writing a trojan. You could have it sit in the background, waiting until it sees Installer.app and then popping up its fake admin password request. It would be much harder to get it to pop up at the right time for Finder (when you try to copy a file you don't have permissions for) or System Prefs (when you click on a padlock).
As for running an app with elevated privilege, well, maybe Granny would think twice about okaying that indiscriminately if she wasn't accustomed to that dialog popping up so much.
Perhaps if I was installing lots of applications all the time I'd have a different experience. It's not that I install apps all the time. It's just that I don't change System Preferences or use Finder to copy unauthorized files all the time:)
Indubitably, but compared to the Safari/LaunchServices Security Theatre this is a peccadillo. Agreed. But it could be a greater security threat overall: 8 years is a lot of training to undo.
Also... I find quite a lot of installers happily run to completion without ever asking me for my password. Are they just emulating Apple's installer, or what? They probably just don't want to install anything to any Library folder.
Actually, for most of the places that dialog pops up, it's not a stupid security dialog. It's verifying that the person sitting in front of the screen is actually authorized to perform an action. No, it is a stupid security dialog. Not because you shouldn't need elevated permissions to install something in/Library; not because you shouldn't need to type your password to gain those elevated permissions; but because you should be able to create an installer using Apple's tools which, by default, puts things in ~/Library. I don't agree that "most" of the places that dialog pops up are unrelated to Installer.app.
You can argue that the burden is on each individual developer to create drag-to-install apps which write to ~/Library when first run, but for one reason or another (often related to customer expectations), people do create installers. It also rather reduces the appeal of drag-to-install if it leaves lots of things in Library folders, i.e., it's not drag-to-uninstall.
The reason Apple is culpable is that they have made it easy to create installers, but only installers that require you to type your admin password. They've done nothing to alleviate the problem of security theatre, and everything to exacerbate it.
Related to the "should I do something stupid" dialog is the "type your admin password to continue" dialog that it's impossible to prevent Apple's installer popping up even if you, the developer, only want to install things in ~/Library rather than/Library.
Thanks, Apple, for training your users these last 8 years to type their admin password at the drop of a hat.
In the second case, he's talking about Bob Metcalf (the nominal inventor of ethernet...) It's particularly ridiculous to talk about how increasing bandwidth will not solve problems in the face of Ethernet, which has consistently beaten off all other comers by piling on the bandwidth even though its link utilisation is piss-poor...
Even if the Finder only told the user the name of the app in question if it were a foreground app, that would still be a vast improvement. After all, "try quitting apps" won't get you very far if it's a background app...
So, you are saying that Objective C is a safe language? No, I am disagreeing with your whole statement, including its conjunction. You'd have thought that someone who purports to understand programming would get this.
In some applications, safety is less important than performance or system-level integration. But not in GUI programming. Again, just because you state this, doesn't make it so.
I am not "confusing" it at all. Objective C is obsolete and inferior to other programming languages Wrong on two counts, as evidenced by 2008's hottest new platform.
I've given you plenty: just about any language that is safe, which means almost any language not in the C family. Hmm. Well, the safest class of languages out there are probably functional languages. But I really must disagree with you that Haskell is particularly suited to GUI programming.
What's that? You didn't mean Haskell? Well SAY WHAT YOU MEAN THEN.
I've been programming in Objective C on and off since Stepstone. The language was mildly superior to C++ 20 years ago, but that's about the best one can say about it. Today, it is obsolete for any application. By "on and off", you presumably mean you once followed a tutorial. Or perhaps you can elaborate on what you think makes C++ a better language? I didn't think so.
What the hell else would you suggest? Allow software to install itself globally WITHOUT admin privileges? No.
Make it so that software by default only works for the user who installed it? Yes. NB "By default" does not mean "force it on the user"; It's just an extra page in the installer wizard to say "Do you want to install this for the current user or for all users?"
I also prefer apps that are installed by dragging them into the applications folder, but if they create things in ~/Library, you're left with exactly the same uninstallation problem as you bemoan in Apple's installer. Unless that's just ~/Library/Preferences/com.domainname.AppName, I'd prefer a paper trail, i.e., an installer receipt.
Anyway, you or I may not create application installers, but as long as some people do, Apple is culpable in training users to type their password freely.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that "I don't want to see/hear it" seems to be a defence, give that we have laws decreeing what may be shown and said on television. You couldn't protest censorship laws by putting on an advertisement showing goatse.cx on mainstream TV in the middle of the day, regardless of whether the broadcaster was prepared to do it.
I live in Britain, and it seems we are getting more and more of a cotton-wool society these days...
Don't think Stalin's gulags and Hitler's gestapo. Think Orwell's Big Brother and Corporate Personhood. That's why the second amendment isn't worth the paper it's written on.
More modern than Vietnam?
Only if you did it while protesting. But your victims would probably quickly learn to stay away from your protest zone.
It's not web browsers that are broken, it's URIs...
What does "pig latin gis" mean?!
Hell, it doesn't even have to be consistent. Americans seem to understand their crazy "middling significant then least significant then most significant" date ordering system, even if it bemuses the hell out the rest of the civilised world.
What you said is "they'll try their damnedest to lock any third party stuff out of what they can."
This is simply not true.
I hope you were being tongue in cheek about remote driving: start with a boring job, add latency, take away direct personal consequence, and you have a recipe for disaster!
I think that for similar reasons IT jobs will continue to be performed onsite -- communication, including giving someone a bollocking, is much easier face to face.
Will he be keeping that? I suspect so!
As for running an app with elevated privilege, well, maybe Granny would think twice about okaying that indiscriminately if she wasn't accustomed to that dialog popping up so much. Perhaps if I was installing lots of applications all the time I'd have a different experience. It's not that I install apps all the time. It's just that I don't change System Preferences or use Finder to copy unauthorized files all the time
You can argue that the burden is on each individual developer to create drag-to-install apps which write to ~/Library when first run, but for one reason or another (often related to customer expectations), people do create installers. It also rather reduces the appeal of drag-to-install if it leaves lots of things in Library folders, i.e., it's not drag-to-uninstall.
The reason Apple is culpable is that they have made it easy to create installers, but only installers that require you to type your admin password. They've done nothing to alleviate the problem of security theatre, and everything to exacerbate it.
Hamish
Related to the "should I do something stupid" dialog is the "type your admin password to continue" dialog that it's impossible to prevent Apple's installer popping up even if you, the developer, only want to install things in ~/Library rather than /Library.
Thanks, Apple, for training your users these last 8 years to type their admin password at the drop of a hat.
Very good points all.
Nice paper. Thanks!
Bad analogy. It's more like getting you to pay for a car that can go 0-150 in X seconds, then trying to fob you off with you a bus pass.
Bless you Ilgaz. That will come in very useful.
I tried Path Finder, but it had too many kitchen sinks in it for my liking.
Even if the Finder only told the user the name of the app in question if it were a foreground app, that would still be a vast improvement. After all, "try quitting apps" won't get you very far if it's a background app...
Hey, coward -- I've replied to your post. See below.
What's that? You didn't mean Haskell? Well SAY WHAT YOU MEAN THEN. I've been programming in Objective C on and off since Stepstone. The language was mildly superior to C++ 20 years ago, but that's about the best one can say about it. Today, it is obsolete for any application. By "on and off", you presumably mean you once followed a tutorial. Or perhaps you can elaborate on what you think makes C++ a better language? I didn't think so.
I also prefer apps that are installed by dragging them into the applications folder, but if they create things in ~/Library, you're left with exactly the same uninstallation problem as you bemoan in Apple's installer. Unless that's just ~/Library/Preferences/com.domainname.AppName, I'd prefer a paper trail, i.e., an installer receipt.
Anyway, you or I may not create application installers, but as long as some people do, Apple is culpable in training users to type their password freely.