0culus

> Now thinking about co's like Facebook ...

This is partly why I am not installing Facebook or Messenger on my iPhone X. Additionally, both apps are massive time wasters for me and, last time I checked, collectively take up a nontrivial amount of space on device. While I haven't been able to entirely exterminate Facebook from my life, restricting myself to accessing it from a "real" computer only has been most refreshing.

Huh, that may be a good point. Both of my Macs are on Sierra and I have and iOS 9 stuck iPad.

Correct. I set a recovery key, force locked the phone (so passcode is required to get back into the phone itself), went to the iCloud security tab as described in the Apple KB article, and proceeded to reset the recovery key. I was only asked for my device passcode.

Isn't that a caveat with a lot of 2fa systems though? If you get locked out and don't have the recovery keys you got when you set it up, you are basically permanently locked out.

I must stand corrected; I just tried setting it up. To set a new recovery key, all you need is the passcode.

Also see the reply I just made to my comment. It's no bueno.

OK, I just tried setting it up. Here's the problem. You can certainly set the recovery key, but you can easily create a new one just with the phone passcode. So if your passcode is compromised, your iCloud account is basically gone.

It's not default, but you can set a recovery key that prevents someone with your phone and passcode from being able to take over your account: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208072

I am on iOS 11. Here is an Apple knowledge base article about it: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208072

If you look in the password and security menu in iCloud settings, there's an option to set a recovery key: "Using a recovery key increases the security of your account. When you create one, the only way to reset your password [emphasis mine] is by using another device [edit: emphasis mine] already signed in with your Apple ID or by entering your recovery key."

I can find no mention of this feature in the article. It would seem that it would mitigate the core problem described by preventing someone in possession of your phone and passcode (but not the recovery key) from taking over your iCloud account.

Fire code where? Requirement to be networked is a new thing to me, at least as far as single family dwellings go.

Very interesting! Thanks for the link. I'm curious if Apple has done something to disable it either themselves or via a special deal with Intel. It's also interestingly timed with the announcement of the new iMac apparently having an A10 coprocessor.[0]

[0]: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/19/imac-pro-a10-chip-hey-s...

How does this affect Apple products? I've looked around for discussion of Intel ME with regards to Apple and the silence out there is deafening. [edit] I guess I also want to know is, does Apple provide Intel firmware patches bundled with their own software update?

I use it for personal projects and schoolwork, mainly to provide me with convenient to configure headless Linux boxes on my Macs without needing to depend on network connectivity to ssh into a remote box (after the initial provisioning and occasional apt-get/yum updates).

Yeah, that could be very good. Especially for people who are no longer students per se...sometimes having access to an expert is the best way to avoid going down the wrong autodidactic path :)

My professor is very helpful, but office hours and schedules can only mesh so much. I'm mainly looking for things I can supplement with to fill in any holes.

I don't think it's worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But this should at a minimum be an opt-in feature, and not opt-out. Better yet, it's probably not needed. I've almost never needed to interact with URLs in a clickable way via a terminal.

I'm not aware of anything like this currently, but I'll ask around. I know the professor for this class has run reading circles in prior semesters.

That's the book we're using!

Thanks, this looks like a fantastic compendium. Will be looking through it.

Usable security sure is hard. My problem is I was invited to keybase back in the old days by a friend. I played with it, and soon forgot it existed. I've just been trying it out again, and it has changed a lot for the better. I feel like someone who isn't completely incapable of computers could make sense of it with some coaching. However, getting grandmother on keybase probably will never happen. :)

[edit] But what is up with the command line tools on macOS? I expected to find them in one of the usual bin locations so it would be in $PATH, but I ended up just aliasing it in my zshrc. It would seem that a symlink to the executable from /usr/local/bin would be appropriate if it needs to stay inside the .app bundle.