Rants by Chort
What's wrong with everything

Ready for a shocker? A lot of the things your IT/Security department makes you do are stupid. According to Microsoft researcher Cormac Herley quoted in The Boston Globe, many "common sense" security practices are economically unwise. In plain English: You lose more money following a lot of security recommendations than you would by just letting the bad thing happen and dealing with the aftermath.

To continue, flip over the keyboard and read the sticky note...

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As many people know, Apple introduced Parental Controls in Tiger. The current version in Snow Leopard allows administrators to block potentially inappropriate content, specific sites, and access to unapproved applications.

The first two work more or less how you would expect (although the error message when a site is blocked for content has been bewildering in my experience), but the application ACLs are a disaster. They prevent the application from being run if it's not approved for that user (in fact, with Simple Finder enabled you can't even see it), but it's when you try to allow a restricted user to access an application that the fun starts.

I haven't examined it in depth, but it appears that OS X adds some kind of wrapper or extended attribute to an application when you enabled a restricted user to run it. The problem is that this extra layer is extremely invasive, and most of the apps I've tried to use it with simply crash. Not only do the crash for the restricted user, but they also crash for unrestricted users. It's demonstrably the Parental Controls that cause this problem, because if you Trash the app and reinstall it, leaving Parental Controls alone, the app will run fine for unrestricted users.

Parental Controls have been around since Tiger, and this problem existed for sure in Leopard (possibly Tiger, I forget when I started using the feature) and definitely still exists in Snow Leopard. So I have a simple question for Apple: Did you bother to QA this feature at all? I know I've submitted the automated reports at least a few times after OS X detected an app crash and it does include audit trail information showing that Parental Control attributes were changed for the app prior to it crashing.

Today is has yielded a bumper-crop of FAIL from various organizations out there. Here is a sampling of the head-scratching stupidity.

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Apple's operating system has long been considered a refuge for those sick of viruses and malware that plague Windows systems, but this reputation for safety has been widely misinterpreted to mean the design is safe. In fact, as has been widely recognized in the security community, it's the relative rarity of Apple machines on networks that simply makes them an economically uninteresting target.

Apple for their part have enthusiastically encouraged this misconception, and while they've benefited from the positive PR, they haven't actually taken the concept of safety to heart. Much like the corporation in Redmond that they delight so much in mocking, they seem determined to ignore security issues until they affect public perception.

Read on for the ownage ->

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It took nearly 7 hours, that's right SEVEN HOURS to build the GIMP.app port (on a 2.33GHz C2D w/4GB RAM), which inexplicably included a full build of gcc4.3. Is that reeeeeeeeeeally necessary when 4.2.1 is included with Xcode? Did those 5 hours of my life have to be wasted? WHY WAS IT YOU COULDN'T JUST UPGRADE PERL???

That's not even the best part. The best part is it got all the way to the gimp-app port itself (after going through a quarter of a day worth of dependencies), and it failed. Yes, apparently there were incompatible functions, which were found three months ago! Diffs were uploaded 3 weeks ago, and 9 days ago instructions were posted for manually applying them, yet today the port was still broken when I tried to install it. Outstanding. Really nice work guys, seriously. Three months?

In case my warning didn't come in time and you actually tried to build this abomination, you need to go here for the solution. If you're even thinking about trying to install gimp-aDON't! There, it's like I just bought you enough time to say goodbye to half a dozen more relatives on your deathbed.