Linked List: September 25, 2019

Wednesday, 25 September 2019

The Talk Show: ‘Apple Is Not a 4-Star Company’ ★

Very special guest Joanna Stern returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s event earlier this month, the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro, iOS 13, and how we go about writing (and shooting) our product reviews.

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Google Chrome Update Rendered Macs Without System Integrity Protection Unbootable ★

Mr. Macintosh:

Sometimes Avid Media Creators use 3rd Party Graphics cards connected to their Mac Pro. When the issue hit yesterday, it was thought that Avid was the main cause of the problems since all the users experiencing the issue had Avid software.

Only later after a MacAdmins deep dive investigation was it found that AVID was NOT the cause of the problem but the Google Chrome was!

Nice detective work here to figure out that Chrome was to blame. The Chrome updater was deleting the /var symlink at the root of the startup volume.

Google:

We recently discovered that a Chrome update may have shipped with a bug that damages the file system on macOS machines with System Integrity Protection (SIP) disabled, including machines that do not support SIP. We’ve paused the release while we finalize a new update that addresses the problem.

Why in the world would a web browser’s software updater be doing anything at all at the root level of the boot volume? The arrogance and presumptuousness here boggles the mind. This is like hiring someone to wash your windows and finding out they damaged the foundation of your house. And people wonder why Apple requires Chrome to be a sandboxed app that uses WebKit on iOS.

Trump Is a Threat to Journalism Around the World ★

New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger:

To give you a sense of what this retreat looks like on the ground, let me tell you a story I’ve never shared publicly before. Two years ago, we got a call from a United States government official warning us of the imminent arrest of a New York Times reporter based in Egypt named Declan Walsh. Though the news was alarming, the call was actually fairly standard. Over the years, we’ve received countless such warnings from American diplomats, military leaders and national security officials.

But this particular call took a surprising and distressing turn. We learned the official was passing along this warning without the knowledge or permission of the Trump administration. Rather than trying to stop the Egyptian government or assist the reporter, the official believed, the Trump administration intended to sit on the information and let the arrest be carried out. The official feared being punished for even alerting us to the danger.

Unable to count on our own government to prevent the arrest or help free Declan if he were imprisoned, we turned to his native country, Ireland, for help. Within an hour, Irish diplomats traveled to his house and safely escorted him to the airport before Egyptian forces could detain him.

We hate to imagine what would have happened had that brave official not risked their career to alert us to the threat.

Here’s the Trump administration position toward the press, spelled out:

Eighteen months later, another of our reporters, David Kirkpatrick, arrived in Egypt and was detained and deported in apparent retaliation for exposing information that was embarrassing to the Egyptian government. When we protested the move, a senior official at the United States Embassy in Cairo openly voiced the cynical worldview behind the Trump administration’s tolerance for such crackdowns. “What did you expect would happen to him?” he said. “His reporting made the government look bad.”

Bigotry, bad economic policy, antipathy to science, sheer incompetence — I’ve railed against all of these aspects of the Trump administration, but all of these can be remedied at the ballot box. What’s most dangerous is Trump’s flagrant disregard for a free press and for free and fair elections, which go hand-in-hand.