Archive for category: AFP548 Site News

Proactive Mac Security: osquery

Proactive Mac Security: osquery

There are two reputations(at least) that your faithful writer is hoping to shake: #1, I do not work for Google. #2, I am not the ‘osquery guy’. I don’t even know any C++! (I’m going to make time for this eventually, though.) However, for three events over the course of […]

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ICYMI – LISA Conversations, with Google

Just a quick post for folks that missed it (I follow Clay on the twitters but got notice it was happening a bit too late), the well-regarded ‘Managing Macs at Google Scale’ talk Clay Caviness and Ed Eigerman gave for LISA ’13 was revisited for their video series, embedded below. […]

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Smother the Sparkler

Smother the Sparkler

You’ve read the Mule, you’ve read Ars, and folks like Mactracker have gone out and moved their feed to https like good citizens. But what about those old, abandoned apps we still want to keep using? Well, this is why it’s called risk management and not fire-proofing. Just like physical […]

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Skipping Network Setup in SetupAssistant

SetupAssistant.app has many fun hidden dot files in /var/db/ and Pepijn Bruienne (@bruienne) has found another good one: /var/db/.MBSkipWiFiSetupIfPossible This dot file will make SetupAssistant skip the WiFi setup portion of the setup in some cases. Only 10.11 and higher will respect this dot file. For SetupAssistant to skip the […]

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Brand New Season, Wrong Ocean

It’s great to be back. You’re not deceived, this is the AFP548 Podcast feed, but we’re piggybacking on it with a new title and format. If you’d like to submit art for our new branding, please let us know through the channels discussed in the episode. (Thanks to Graham Gilbert […]

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MacUpdate Considered Harmful

MacUpdate Considered Harmful

Just for those that didn’t see this: https://blog.malwarebytes.org/news/2015/11/has-macupdate-fallen-to-the-adware-plague/ $ strings /Volumes/MacUpdate\ Installer/MacUpdate\ Installer.app/Contents/bin/AssetsChanger | grep browser 18BrowserTools_Opera 19BrowserTools_Safari 19BrowserTools_Chrome MacUpdate has decided to sell out their good name and lie down with the scummiest hijackers on the internet by allowing downloads to be delivered as an app instead of the […]

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Challenges My Organization Faces Upgrading to OS X 10.11, El Capitan

Challenges My Organization Faces Upgrading to OS X 10.11, El Capitan

As if you haven’t heard, there’s something new this month to cause drama on the Apple upgrade treadmill (just as nefarious as Slack dragging everyone’s communication watering hole into the future). This time it’s the coming System Integrity Protection and other tightening restrictions we’re all dealing with. I wanted to […]

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(Design of, and) How to Generate ‘Memorable’ Passwords

As part of a security initiative to make distinct firmware passwords per machine and escrow them to Crypt’s newly distinct ‘secrets’ database table, I came up with the idea to make an analogue to the Password Assistant you see in Keychain Access or the Accounts pane of System Preferences. And […]

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Thunderstruck Update via Shea Craig

Just a quick link to (your friend and mine) Shea ‘G’ Craig’s blog for an update about the new Thunderstrike patches that came down with 10.10.4, head over there for the skinny. Two notes, if you don’t have a local Reposado server downloading pkgs, here’s the link on Apple’s WAN […]

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Autopkg – Download Recipe Decision Making Process

Autopkg – Download Recipe Decision Making Process

It’s been a long-standing goal of mine to help people get started making their own recipes for autopkg, which was recently spurred on by revisiting my previously-discussed recipeGenerationUtils. The autopkg wiki can only be so instructive on the process besides some general guidelines, so I thought I’d expand on some points here, while […]

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