mac posts

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In Mac OS Sonoma, browsers now require and the OS will ask for the “Local Network” permission to access local websites. I didn’t know why it was asking and didn’t allow it, but then couldn’t access my sites. I had to go to “System Settings”, the “Privacy & Security” pane, select “Local Network” and turn on for my browser(s) to get access again.

If it matters, my local dev setup uses domains set in /etc/hosts pointing to IPs of VMs run by VirtualBox, managed by Vagrant, set up like web.vm.network 'private_network', ip: '192.168.56.1'.

Mac: create app launch keyboard shortcuts

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I wanted to create some global keyboard shortcuts for launching apps on MacOS. I used to do this with Quicksilver, but I’ve stopped using that and now just use Spotlight for most of what I used that for. Spotlight, of course, doesn’t have all the features of Quicksilver, including keyboard shortcuts for arbitrary actions. The “Keyboards Shortcuts” pane in System Settings can do a lot, but not specify a specific app to launch. Searching around the web, I found that Automator could be used to add services to it. So a flow to do this for an app would be like:

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xz backdoor

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Reading this weekend about a backdoor introduced to the open source xz project. It doesn’t appear to affect my Ubuntu servers, so I had assumed it wasn’t relevant to me. However, the homebrew version on my Mac was “vulnerable”. It sounds like the exploit would only work on some versions of Linux, but if it does work on Macs, that could be bad. I do a lot of stuff on this computer, including banking, email, coding, etc. They know about it backdooring ssh, but if there’s something they don’t yet know about, it might be a problem.

I have a Fedora install as well. I haven’t checked it yet, but Fedora is usually on the bleeding edge, so if it’s on there, I’ll probably wipe and reinstall. I’ve been considering anyway. Luckily, I don’t do anything important on there.

Even if it didn’t actually do anything bad on the Mac, it may have done something. I had noticed some weeks or months ago (I can’t remember when) that running PHP on the command line was going slow. Running anything would take a minimum of about five seconds, including something simple like php -r 'echo "hello\n";'. I know when I had been making scripts in the past they hadn’t been taking long at all. I did some searches on the web for anybody mentioning something like that and couldn’t find anything. So I kinda just figured maybe it had something to do with the new opcode / whatever cacheing newer versions do or something, like it takes some initial setup that the server can reuse but not the command line. I assumed I was stuck with it and even started moving some scripts to bash partly because of it. When I downgraded xz via homebrew though, I decided to test it. time says the simple php -r line took 0.092 seconds. Nice and snappy. So maybe xz was doing some checks to see if the device was exploitable. It was in the dependency graph of PHP through curl and gd. Can’t say for sure that it just sped up though and if the xz change was what caused it.

I’m glad my scripts finally run quickly again, but hope that nothing was exploited here. I’ll keep an eye on the web to see if anything comes up about Macs being exploitable, and if so I’ll probably reinstall the OS to be safe.

Note: If you have used homewbrew to install PHP, curl, or anything else that might depend on xz, run brew update; brew upgrade to be safe. The dangers of being on the bleeding edge I guess.

git: MacOS default branch now “main”?

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At some point recently, git init on my Mac has started to default to the branch name “main”. It did this for a repo I created today, but not for one created August 29th, so maybe Apple made a change in an update sometime between then and now. I haven’t been able to find anything about the change on the web though.

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Purchase: New laptop, MacBook Air

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I’ve made another new laptop purchase in the past couple months: I bought a refurbished 2020 MacBook Air from Apple.com. It has a 10th gen i3 Intel processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. I bought it to replace my struggling 11 year old MacBook. I bought a Lenovo Yoga 7i, but was struggling to get comfortable with it for my web development work. I made the call to get the Mac so I could directly migrate both my work computer user and my personal computer users, with the plan to use it for development and use the Yoga for other stuff.

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