Comments on: Dashboard drives home

By: Sparky

Sparky — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 21:22:53 +0000

I feel secure with my widgets as long as I have an app like Little Snitch. It alerted me when dashboardadvisoryd came up.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 03:58:46 +0000

It is infact smaller… very strange. My fiance was holding off updating her macbook just to see what happened with the ‘guinea pigs’ first :) and I checked it against hers last week before the update… Sure enough, it’s smaller on my powerbook now. I actually kind of like it.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 15:03:01 +0000

This is related to the 10.4.7 update, but not the dashboard phoning home. I noticed my apple and spotlight on the menu have become smaller after the update. Has anyone else experienced the same thing, or I am just imagining it?

By: slimeyapple

slimeyapple — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 05:23:31 +0000

I don’t have a problem with Apple verifying a widget but — eventually everything is ‘spoofable’. Eventually people who believe nothing bad can happen to a mac (who will never employ a silly thing such as a firewall) will have no idea which widgets are accessing which ports and for what reason.

(I am not affiliated with any software companies, but…) I use LittleSnitch on my Powerbook and Zone Alarm on the PCs in my house.

– i’m not insecure. i just don’t trust a lot of people

By: Ken

Ken — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 08:10:39 +0000

I’m ok with my computer sending some info back home, but I wish it did it in a more proper way.

I won’t doubt that it’s done for our security but, at first sight, it looked like a security threat itself. A warning message or an option to turn this thing on and off would be the best practice to do it.

By: Todd Baur

Todd Baur — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 02:24:33 +0000

Jules,

Once you give a rogue widget (or anything on the system, for that matter) your password, then it can do whatever it’s scripted to do.

One of my wishes for 10.5 or later is the option during setup to separate the admin account privilege completely from the user created. The problem with this is I don’t have a better idea for Unix security and ease than what Apple already did. Perhaps, it is better then to just set a different password than to match what the user and root have. Sure this can be done as an afterthought, but realistically most users don’t know to open Terminal and issue ‘sudo passwd root’, or to set a master password for the system.

The industry has created a lot of problems for itself! Security versus convenience has a long way to go…

By: Mantiz

Mantiz — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 00:01:49 +0000

Well if they say that they are doing it, no problem with me, a company collecting info this way to better their product and openly admiting it says to me “good company trying to better their product”. On the other hand even if they aren’t doing anything with the info(other than making the program better) why “hide” it from me
or not actively inform me as a good PR manager whould probably call it. I might be a little paranoid but when for example my supermarket does this in the form of a bonus card, i know they save a lot of money from reaserch but i’m getting something back from it in the form of cheaper products(the same way i would get something back from better software), the difference is they are open about it, that makes alot of people feel more comfortable about it, as a result my supermarket gets 0 complains about it. I’m guessing apple is going to get a lot of people asking questions about this.
But i really don’t have a big problem with this kind of reaserch in general, as long as my name isn’t put next to the data for “future use in case of company money problems” of course. :)

By: JulesLt

JulesLt — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 20:22:43 +0000

Todd – I think you’re absolutely spot on. Having a kill switch for rogue widgets is absolutely necessary. It strikes me as the weakest part of Apple’s platform on some very simple grounds – a LOT more people know JavaScript than know Cocoa. And people don’t think of them as applications.

Let’s think about the consequences of the following two links :

http://www.alastairs-place.net/archives/000079.html

http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2006/07/giving_your_widget_that_sudo_v_1.html?CMP=OTC-13IV03560550&ATT=Giving Your Widget that sudo Voodoo

I’m thinking – an otherwise useful widget throws up – ‘There is a new version of this Widget. Install. Cancel’. Pressing Install throws up something that looks like the standard ‘You do not have permissions. Authenticate’ dialog. Then uses that to open network sharing and send the admin password out somewhere public.

By: _ugly

_ugly — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 18:36:24 +0000

what ryan said

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 17:47:03 +0000

personally i’ve got exactly zero problems with apple collecting usage/widget information about my dashboard. if anything it’ll help them improve (like by preventing spyware or keeping stuff up-to-date like you said)…

i really don’t get the people who get all fussy about this. newsflash apple doesn’t care enough about you to get any personal information… what’re they going to do with it? sell it to someone? unlikely, it would be a PR nightmare and could hardly be that big of a money maker for them. similarly this isn’t like microsoft trying to break your os if there is any chance in hell your product key is invalid, it’s just apple trying to keep tabs on what’s going on with dashboard… THAT’S ALL!