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We talk often on this forum of how innaccessible giants like Google and Amazon are for the little guy. I thus found this point particularly interesting: >"Atte
by loufe 6y ago
We talk often on this forum of how innaccessible giants like Google and Amazon are for the little guy. I thus found this point particularly interesting:
>"Attempts to contact the vendor through regular support channels were unsuccessful so we ended up searching LinkedIn and managed to find an engineer working on the core antivirus detection. They immediately understood the seriousness of the problem and took prompt action to get a fix shipped, thus preventing quite the disaster for the users of this product. It’s notable that without this last-ditch effort we would have been effectively blocked from releasing a native Apple Silicon version for an indefinite period."
- bluedino 6y agoIf Mozilla can’t get a hold of anyone... 20 years ago Google would have sent someone to Mozilla HQ for a week to work on stuff
- OnlyMortal 6y agoApple did this when transitioning from CodeWarrior to the GNU chain. Apple had to apply patches to the C++ compiler for the company I was at.
- zerkten 6y agoThis is surprisingly common for large companies. It often isn't formalized because no one wants to dedicate engineers to going onsite with customers. Often the expert is too valuable to give up, or is a poor choice for customer engagement. If you have a consulting team, they may lack the experience needed, or reputation, that the customer wants. As soon as you send the expert onsite, you will have a challenge not sending them at a later time. This scares off engineering managers from lending their engineers because inevitably they have to fight off the requests. The better workflow is one where you can send a less expensive resource (however you measure it) onsite and have them work remotely with the expert. If you can stick with that you often end up with the onsite person leveling up their skills and the ability to re-engage in a scalable manner. Any engagement needs prep before the onsite, a plan for escalation when onsite, and a disengagement plan.
- OnlyMortal 6y agoIt was Agfa in Antwerp. Their guy was very polite but I had to explain to him what was going wrong. I think he was more tech support than anything else. Edit: Apple also had to change the linker for the sake of Macromedia’s monolithic applications. Another story though.
- vlovich123 6y agoThis is the problem with jumping to conclusions from a vague excerpt. The vendor is some random anti-virus vendor and if you know what trying to get a handle there means.... > More of a concern was user reports that some antivirus software was flagging all our Universal Binaries as malware, and corrupting the Firefox installation the moment the update arrived. > The software was using machine learning techniques and presumably observed that our combined Universal Binaries didn’t quite look like any other legitimate software it had ever seen before. > Attempts to contact the vendor through regular support channels were unsuccessful so we ended up searching LinkedIn and managed to find an engineer working on the core antivirus detection.
- rebelwebmaster 6y agoIt was Cylance made by Blackberry.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dubcanada 6y agoObviously there is more to it then what I am going to say, and who knows with remote workers where people are. But Apple and Mozilla headquarters are 5 miles apart (roughly). Couldn't you just walk/drive/scoot/fly/what ever over and talk to someone?
- dak1 6y agoIt sounds like this was an issue with an independent antivirus vendor, not Apple.
- milkytron 6y agoI'd imagine that security and the front desk are going to prevent anyone from entering to meet with specific teams or individuals without an appointment. If you knew someone and had scheduled time with them, then yeah I'm sure you could hoverboard your way over.
- djrogers 6y agoSetting aside that the problem with AV had nothing to do with Apple, for the most part nobody was working at either of those offices over the summer (2020, remember?). Also, which of Apple's 130+ Silicon Valley offices are you going to go to, and who do you ask for when you get there?
- dblohm7 6y agoAlso, pandemic, remote workers, etc. gcp and the engineers who worked on this do not live in SV.
- jmull 6y agoThey are being very careful not to identify the anti-virus vendor. So it's hard to tell if the size of the vendor is the issue here.
- selykg 6y agoMy experience working with antivirus vendors is... not good. Product I used to work on had frequent false positives from antivirus software marking certain files as having some malware or whatever in it. It's super unpleasant trying to get those changes pushed out. Glad that they were able to get some resolution quickly, usually that isn't the case, at least in my experience.
- duxup 6y agoI was a back channel route to engineering at a company I worked for a while. A few of the engineers trusted me and a couple select customers / sales guys knew they could come to me to run a bug by me 'in theory' and if we had enough information I could unofficially run it by engineering without going through the song and dance of the typical support channels. I could get a quick ya or nay form them on some things and it was so much faster for everyone involved. If it was a ya, I knew we had something, still more work to do but the case would skyrocket through the usual channels and engineering was engaged and ready. If it was a nay, the usual channels it went and everyone was ok with that. The engineers would give me a few minutes knowing I wasn't going to bring them poorly thought out garbage, I would limit the rate of these special situations, and special customers / sales guys could get the job done way faster. It was a well known process by those who knew about it... but not everyone knew.
- anonymouse008 6y agoThat sounds like a dream career -- any advice getting there when you've hacked on graveyard startups most your life?
- duxup 6y agoIt wasn't an official job. I was a regular support drone as far as anyone knew. I just had some connections that came about because I could be discrete and the engineers understood that I didn't bring them garbage too early (without enough information) or without good reason.
- macksd 6y agoAnd this is why it's important to recognize and retain people who get the right things done. One does not simply backfill a support position and replace someone who has built up the internal AND external reputation and relationships required for issues like this to get fast-tracked and fixed in a way that makes everyone happy.
- dingaling 6y ago
- meibo 6y agoThe antivirus industry is the biggest player of the modern adware/malware crisis. The dark patterns used in software like AVG and avast, both making every system I see them on so slow that they might as well be unusable, are all focused on getting more installs, be it to force people into getting whatever "premium" subscription or harvesting data(e.g. attaching themselves to every sent email like a virus). There are very few that I could actually recommend, like Malwarebytes - for most users, Windows Defender will be more than enough nowadays. I haven't used a mac in a while, do you actually need AV on them today?
- sjg007 6y agoI mean there is mac malware and some of it is quite sophisticated. The compiled apple script bitcoin miner being one of the more ingenious ones. But those were distributed through pirated applications. There are probably a few zero days as well that maybe an AVE package could help stop if a signature is rapidly distributed. Ignoring the fact that the AV engine itself is a target too. Most people using only the app store helps cut that down.
- wlesieutre 6y agoThe one in recent memory for me is the KeRanger ransomware that was distributed in the official Transmission installer. https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/new-os-x-ransomware-keranger-infected-transmission-bittorrent-client-installer/ https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/new-os-x-ransomware-kera... >Transmission representative John Clay told Reuters via email that the ransomware was added to disk-image of its software after the project's server was compromised in a cyber attack. >"We're not commenting on the avenue of attack, other than to say that it was our main server that was compromised," he said. "The normal disk image (was) replaced by the compromised one."
- setpatchaddress 6y agoJust to answer the original question: that's an example of something Apple handled -- no external AV required.
- robin_reala 6y agoI guess this was Cylance: I ran into this one on my work laptop with Firefox Nightly and managed to get it escalated internally from us too.
- ksec 6y ago>It’s notable that without this last-ditch effort we would have been effectively blocked from releasing a native Apple Silicon version for an indefinite period." And they are Mozilla. Imagine Indies. The Modern Day Apple requires you to get some Mainstream Media publish about How Apple block Open Sources Software to be running on M1 before Apple saw the PR damage and start acting on it.
- mlyle 6y agoThis was about Cylance being jerks, not Apple. I've fought Cylance quite a bit on Windows for flagging open source software as malware, too (and they fail to respond / fix).
- e40 6y agoThis really bugs me about Apple. We had the DTK (pre-release hardware for the M1). We got into trouble with an upgrade from beta2 to beta10 and the machine was bricked. Everywhere we turned, we were told to use the developer forums. We did. There were no responses there and I didn't see anyone but customer helping customers. So, since we're an Apple developer, we decided we would use one of our DTS (developer technical support) tickets. Nope. Pre-release anything is not supported. So, we ended up waiting for release, bought a new M1 mini and then started our porting effort. Then, we ran into problems and used one of our DTS incidents and we got some help. However, we lost months.
- gigatexal 6y agoIt's not like Mozilla is a nobody software outfit. For this to be what they had to do go get someone's attention at Apple is terrible.
- tyingq 6y agoOh wow. So in this case, a foundation with roughly half a billion in revenue per year is still somewhat of a little guy, at least for the standard process. I'm curious which antivirus vendor it was. Mozilla did eject a few extensions written by antivirus vendors in 2019, probably for good reasons.
- TwoBit 6y agoAV vendors and software are cancer.
- dpkonofa 6y agoI'm not sure I follow. Why would an anti-virus product accidentally flagging their Universal Binary block them from releasing a native Apple Silicon version? Of all the Macs in use, I'd have to imagine that only a small percentage are using that specific anti-virus software much less any anti-virus software at all. It might cause them some headaches with specific people who are using that software but why extend that all the way to blocking the release indefinitely?
- drewg123 6y agoI was doing Mac drivers about a decade ago, and some of the dumbest and most ignorant questions on the kernel and drivers mailing lists came from A/V folks. Things like "my machine locks up when our software does X", where it was clear that X was blocking the entire kernel waiting for a userpace thread. Ugh. I've resolved to never, ever run A/V software on any machine I control based on the quality of those devs.
- slim 6y agobecause A/V folks are hackers, not engineers. hackers do impressive things without reading the fucking manual. that's why they can break seemingly unbreakable things. but on the surface, to the engineer, they seem uncompetent.
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agohow do you "secure" machines if they are windows ones and dumb people plugin flash drives and click on big shiny download ram buttons. genuinely curious.
- icebraining 6y agoOne way to do it is to whitelist all binaries in the system, and sandbox all applications (to prevent chances of a malicious PDF/image/etc abusing a buggy application).
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agocan you do that on windows? every single exe, every process?
- icebraining 6y agoYeah, the security policies let you do that. I think the current mechanism is called AppLocker. Note that there may be still ways to bypass it if you're an attacker sitting at the computer, rather than a hapless user.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoEven working for a big multinational with a big tailored support contact, support from our major IT services vendor is abysmal. It's not just the little guys that have trouble.
- ttflee 6y agoThe issue itself sounds like a prologue for an A.I. dystopian story.
- oauea 6y agoSurprising they even went through with that. Personally I'd have said fuck it, blamed Apple and moved on with my life. If Apple wants to create incompatible hardware, let them put the effort & money into fixing the software, if they want the software on their platform.
- m_st 6y agoThough I get your point, in this particular case it was the antivirus company that was the problem. Not Apple.
- m_st 6y agoI once did the same with Microsoft Windows 8 (or 8.1) keyboard layout changes breaking old software. You'd think they don't suddenly change from '.' to ',' as decimal separator. But that's what they did. And so did Apple more years ago by the way, even resulting in a calculator that couldn't be used anymore with the numeric keypad. Anyway, found a guy working on keyboard layout stuff at Microsoft through LinkedIn as the other support channels were non-responsive. Unfortunately he just confirmed the change if I remember correctly. But at least we knew what was coming.