person / partner / dad / sre@mozilla
If you’re mailing in your iPhone for a trade-in, I highly recommend taking a quick video of the device, highlighting its condition and serial number before packing it up and handing it to the UPS worker. It saved me this time, and has helped others I know in the past
Some days I think I know almost all there is to know about Apple software/hardware. Other times, especially being new to the CI/CD world professionally, I feel like I know very little.
A week ago a friend sent me an image they had taken at a bar over iMessage. Because he was traveling, I wondered if the location data was attached. To my surprise, it was.
Another friend working in Apple Retail confirmed this was expected behavior. If you wish to not share that data, there is a workaround but you do have to apply it on a case by case basis.
When sharing an image from the Share Sheet, you will see an Options menu that will allow you disable location data from being shared.
This approach seems problematic in many ways. One scenario that could be quite common is the influx of individuals using dating apps. Sharing images via those channels more than likely strips this information (hopefully), but surely its puts those at risk who share photos with people over iMessage that they are just getting to know.
I decided to file my first Apple Security bug and receive confirmation that this is expected behavior. I’d like to see Apple implement a setting to disable sharing this information by default.
If you’ve ever tried using Time Machine with a NAS pre-APFS days you’ll know the experience left a lot to be desired. I was encouraged by a colleague to give this another shot and am happy to report a huge improvement in speed and performance.
The initial backup of my machine, which was roughly 80GB of data took about 70 minutes to complete. I am also happy to report that Time Machine remembers the location of the NAS and will auto-mount it as needed.
If you’re using an UnRAID NAS, you will find this guide helpful:
https://wiki.unraid.net/UnRAID_6/Configuring_Apple_Time_Machine
If you have the pleasure of binding your macOS fleet to Active Directory some of you may have noticed issues using the sudo command for administrative users.
Chatter on the MacAdmins slack channel suggests that Apple has acknowledged the issue and will resolve it in a future update. Here’s how we’re temporarily working around this:
#!/bin/bash
# Collects the logged in user
loggedInUser="$(stat -f%Su /dev/console)"
# Checks to ensure logged in user isn't already in sudoers
if grep -Rq "$loggedInUser" /etc/sudoers
then
echo "User ID already exists in sudoers file...Exiting"
else
echo "$loggedInUser ALL = (ALL) ALL" >> /etc/sudoers
fi
Short and sweet. Run as root.