Nasty macOS flaw is bricking MacBooks: Don't install this update - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomsguide.com/news/nasty-macos-flaw-is-bricking-macbooks-dont-install-this-update <comment><USER3> This has been mentioned quite a few times but Apple's software quality seriously has taken a turn for the worse in the last few years. I've usually updated my macs to the latest OS's within a couple of weeks of release, but Catalina is the first time where I still have yet to update. Stories of bugs such as this as well as mail messages getting blanked out and unrecoverable makes me actually scared to upgrade.

<comment><USER4> Does anyone know what might have caused this recent downturn in Apple's software quality?

<comment><USER5> Not sure myself though I'm sure books will in future be written about "the early signs of Apple's demise". My MacbookAir 6,2 (mid-2013) was screwed after the 10.15.4 update (not the supplemental). The SSD was totally not recognised. I've tried SMC and NVRAM resets numerous times and remote Recovery. The drive is now invisible. I opened it up to reseat it (cleaning pins and socket) to no avail.

Fortunately I've got a 256GB SDXC card which I've installed Pop!_OS on - <USER2> has convinced me that now's as good a time as any to extricate myself from the Apple ecosystem (which I'm all in on - iCloud, Apple Music etc). My next laptop will be non-Apple. First non-Apple hardware in this house since 2003.

I'll try swapping the drive with my daughter's - she has the same model. At least I'll know whether it's the drive or the logic board. Then I can sell the bits.

<comment><USER6> The screen on my MacbookPro13,1 (late 2016) recently gave out. I needed a replacement but I was not convinced by any of the current Apple offerings -- I can't stand the stupid touch bar on the Pros, and the new MBA didn't sufficiently excite me.

The usual build-to-order options like Dell or Lenovo being backordered due to the pandemic, I walked into a Costco and bought a LG Gram 17[0]. This is the first time I bought a laptop off the shelf, and the first time my primary laptop has not been a Mac, in over a decade. I installed Xubuntu 18.04 LTS on it with no fanfare and have been quite happy with it since.

The early signs of Apple's demise, indeed.

[0] [https://www.lg.com/us/laptops/lg-17z90n-r.aac8u1-ultra- slim-...](https://www.lg.com/us/laptops/lg-17z90n-r.aac8u1-ultra-slim-laptop)

<comment><USER7> what did you do with the dead macbook? i'd be interested in purchasing it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is interesting. I sat down at my machine on Thursday morning, and it was entirely unresponsive. It had warned me about installing updates the previous evening, but I've done this many times without an issue, and regardless, they are always complete by morning. I waited a minute or two for any sign of life (beyond the fans running), and then held power. I heard the unpleasant sound of the fans spinning up to high RPM and then shutting off rapidly. I waited a few seconds and then held power again. The machine showed a slow progress bar, but then finally I saw "26 minutes remaining" below it. I was pretty surprised that the update was running, but I figured it had just started late or hung, and ran a bit later into the working hours.

This article makes me reevaluate that thought.

Coincidentally, one of my colleagues had warned the team about installing macOS updates, since he was having repeated issues with kernel panics on the original 10.15.4 update.

I hope Apple can get some of this together a little better going forward.

<comment><USER9> For added irony, my Hackintosh installed the update without missing a beat.

<comment><USER10> I have been a Hackintosh user since 2010 and I've never had a system break in point release. If you set it up right, it's not that common.

Major version upgrades are an entirely different matter, although even they sometimes just work with Clover.

<comment><USER9> I just moved my system from Clover to OpenCore last week. A couple of hours of paying attention and reading and voila.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think companies are pushing updates way too aggressively to those who have auto update on.

Is there some reason why phased release isn't more common among OS/firmware updates?

Auto update does not have to mean "update my device the day new versions are out".

Edit: Is this related to public disclosure of security bugs? If so, the community should change their standard so that public disclosure doesn't happen until a week after the update is available. This would allow for phased rollouts.

<comment><USER12> What OS X and Windows, IOS, Android and probably lots of others need, is Long Term Support releases. I'm so sick and tired of my phone and computer switching up major features and UI every year, because some UX person wants to not get fired.

Releasing a new major version of your OS yearly is insane.

<comment><USER13> On windows you can choose to get feature updates with a 4 month delay if you have windows pro (set updates to "Semi-Annual Channel" instead of "Semi-Annual Channel (Targeted)", and yes microsoft are indeed terrible with naming things). I never had issues with windows updates on that branch. There is also windows enterprise long term servicing branch (LTSB), which gets feature updates every 3 years (but is meant more for things like point of sale systems, not for regular PC's).

On macOS you can stay one major release behind. So, stay on mojave until the successor to catalina is released, then upgrade to catalina. You still get security fixes and full software ecosystem support, but far fewer issues with buggy updates.

On android and iOS you don't really have good options to my knowledge.

<comment><USER14> Second the recommendation to stay on Mojave. I do this for my $WORK laptop and it still gets back-ported security updates. $WORK's IT department has advised Apple users to hold off upgrading to 10.15 and it seems they have good reason to continue dispensing that advice, still...!

<comment><USER15> Heck, I do that with my personal laptop. Feeling pretty happy having read these comments that I never took the leap to Catalina.

I feel pretty sure this must be common because I still see apps and infrastructure, even last month, coming out with updates related to Catalina compatibility.

It sucks though. I have a Google Pixel phone and never hesitate to apply updates, I even look forward to them. I don't think I've ever had an Android phone experience the sort of severe regressions that occur regularly with Apple updates.

I've been a MBP user for a long time, but I'm really starting to wonder if it's time to take a leap soon. I've been using this laptop for maybe a year and:

1\. I'm scared to upgrade to the latest OS

2\. The screen's coating has been damaged and has key-print impressions on it. This _always happens_ and Apple seem incapable of fixing it.

3\. The latest butterfly keyboard has at least not broken on me for 8 months or so, but the options, C and A keys have worn through and now have holes in them. This started happening a few generations ago and now seems like a regular problem that I'm just supposed to accept.

4\. Very soon after getting it something happened to the metal such that it has a large discolouration on the bottom left, of a type I've never seen before. Nothing seems to fix it.

5\. The screen routinely gets a yellow splotch in one of the corners if the laptop has been in my backpack for a while.

The problem is that despite not even really having improved for years, macOS is probably still the best OS out there. Linux on laptops has never worked well - my colleagues who try to use it routinely have issues with webcams not working properly. Windows laptops seem to vary wildly in quality and many of them have stupid design flaws like putting the webcam at the bottom of the screen instead of the top, coming loaded with crapware, anti-virus products that cripple performance, Windows is still a rats nest of weird problems under the hood. And their way to make it better for developers is to just bundle Linux?

I really wish there was more competition in the laptops-for-technical-people space.

<comment><USER13> FWIW I put ubuntu LTS on my thinkpad T460p and everything worked flawlessly except for the fingerprint reader. For thinkpads that seems to be the rule: everything works except for the fingerprint reader.

If you want good linux support on a laptop you need to do some research, but there are options. Thinkpads, XPS, ... They're just not that much cheaper than a macbook if you want comparable specs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 2018 MBP, Using it on battery, saw I was at 20% plugged it in, noticed it was running like crap so I started closing applications, restarted it. Still running like crap after reboot, also noticed fans were not spinning figured maybe an SMC reset is in order when I realized it was at 2% battery, had not been charging, status said it was plugged in but not charging. Powered it off to do the SMC reset and I can get nothing from it now, not a thing, no sounds, no signs of life, no fans, no apple logo, no clicks from the trackpad. I think this qualifies as a brick.

</comment><comment><USER17> Timing of this cannot be more wrong. WFH and no store opened will make this more worse.

<comment><USER18> I'm actually a little surprised they're pushing out updates at all right now. They have to be aware of the risk.

<comment><USER19> Supplemental updates usually fix serious bugs or ones that impact a lot of people. They're fairly rare.

<comment><USER20> Indeed. The problem was 10.15.4 to start with. One reason to roll out the supplemental update was because 10.15.4 broke Facetime compatibility with older iOS and macOS versions (which is particularly bad in the current crisis).

Maybe they shouldn't have released 10.15.4 right now, but instead only the security fixes in this release. But they had to push out that release to support the new MacBook Air.

Another problem with such reports is that it is hard to get an idea of how widespread this problem is. And whether the problem (perhaps) already occurred with previous Catalina updates, but is now picked up more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am quite the Apple apologist, but Catalina is awful.

1\. As seen here, it's a bugfest.

2\. For user-facing features, it brings…Sidecar? And a bunch of half-assed Catalyst apps, I suppose.

3\. Such an exciting new set of security features—really met what I have to guess was their goal to quickly train me to click OK on every single dialog to get to work.

<comment><USER22> For 3, what it's taught me is that I have to load a video conference, go into the privacy settings, allow use of camera and microphone, then _exit the video conference_ and load it again before anyone can see or hear me.

I'm a consultant and talk to multiple clients all with their own video conference solution and having to do this every time I join a call where a client is using a different video conference solution is very unprofessional. The worst was using Teams where I had to close my browser before I could join the conference, after I had already queued up everything I needed for the call. So now everyone is waiting on me to re-open everything and reset the state for the demo.

I never thought I'd miss Windows UAC.

<comment><USER23> Surely this is the fault of the app and not macOS? I have plenty of apps that asked for those permissions once, got it, and never asked again.

<comment><USER22> They're not asking again but asking for the first time is what is disruptive because it forces you to close whatever application is requesting permissions. It's sucks when WebEx does it but at least that only makes you close WebEx. Still a really poor design choice but not nearly as disruptive as browser- based tools that make you close your browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there any _actual quantitative evidence_ this update is any worse than any average update? The article presents _three_ forum posts as evidence... which isn't evidence.

I assume every update ever has messed up a handful of people's computers, even if just coincidentally (e.g. the computer was going to die on the next reboot no matter what).

If thousands of people were complaining on Twitter that would be one thing. But since there aren't, and considering that Apple hasn't pulled the update...

Is this just much ado about nothing?

<comment><USER25> 2019 imac getting kernel panics when going to sleep.

It seems silly if you're not affected. But now that it's hit me, i'm about to go back to mojave. If it was just a weird bug, I could deal with it. But to kernel panic is a big deal to me. I cant trust the computer to not break if I walk away from it for 10 minutes.

I guess I could turn off sleep, but that doesnt seem like a solution to me. To keep it running all the time so it doesnt break? nah.

<comment><USER26> This could very well be a hardware or deeper issue. I had a similar but more specific issue with my 2018 mbp, and managed to isolate the issue after quite a bit of trial and error. They replaced it with a 2019 model brand new. I think for me it was specific to letting the battery drain completely, then closing it and plugging it into power and waiting a while. I'd open to a computer that had kernal panicked. It could be related to deep sleep/hibernate, where the contents of ram is written to the ssd and then restored on wake. You can test this probably by setting a hibernate timer and then testing what happens if it sleeps for just under and just over that time.

<comment><USER27> This happens to me, but only when I'm connected to my LG ultra fine. I can't reliably reproduce it. Can you elaborate on how you did it?

<comment><USER26> I reproduced it by eliminating aspects of the scenario and combing through logs. For example, for a long time I only knew it was happening sometime after the laptop went to sleep, but that's all. After paying attention to my patterns, I isolated out the case where the laptop would sleep only for a few minutes on or off power. Then I did the same thing but either pulled the power cable or plugged it in after it went to sleep. Then I tried variants of those after letting it sleep for a long time. Nothing was reproducible for a very long time until I noticed that the specific case of first using it till the battery was dead, then letting it sit for a while, then plugging it in and then opening the lid caused the kernel panic. It persisted through two screen replacements and one motherboard replacement if memory serves. Not totally sure how that happened, but it could have been a faulty SSD or something.

It was extremely satisfying to finally isolate it to 100% reproducibility. Peak of my career right there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I thought this would be about the 10.15.4 update, which had known problems, but instead it's the supplemental hotfix that was supposed to address them:

 _" This supplemental update for macOS 10.15.4 Catalina, released Wednesday (April 8), was meant to resolve issues created by the 10.15.4 update in late March."_

</comment><comment><USER29> My 2019 mbp was bricked with the previous update. Apple support said that they need to take a physical look, but all of their stores are closed until further notice.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

And by "bricked" I mean - no signs of life whatsoever

</comment><comment><USER30> Odd, this seems to be happening across the industry and is now either reported better or just more prevalent. Besides bricks (well, is it a brick if you can recover?) we have seen post-update BSOD's, data loss, browsers going bad, settings getting reset on various operating systems of the big vendors out there. I know that it isn't like software 'used to be perfect' but this type of defect feels bigger than it used to be.

<comment><USER31> I guess two reasons:

1\. The OS update policies became more "agile". Both Windows and macOS starts to update the OS more often than ever. macOS moved to an annual update from biannual, Windows 10 switched to a subscription-like model.

2\. They laid off the testing team and stopped testing on actual PCs in favor of VMs. [1] It makes sense considering the broken updates are often more low- level bugs that cannot be caught by VMs.

[1]: [https://www.techradar.com/news/windows-10-problems-are- ruini...](https://www.techradar.com/news/windows-10-problems-are-ruining- microsofts-reputation-and-the-damage-cant-be-underestimated)

<comment><USER32> > _They laid off the testing team_

Must be good for the bottom line.

The cost is absorbed by the unlucky users.

<comment><USER33> It's another case of focusing on the short term to save money. In the long term it damages their reputation and some frustrated businesses/users might start to consider moving away from their products if a viable alternative exists.

<comment><USER34> Unfortunately there's only two players in this game (I doubt mass consumption of linux any time soon). So, if they both suck, neither loses the reputation game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Well, that's it for Catalina then. Although I really want full Xcode 11.4/Swift UI/Swift 5.2 and my MacBook Pro a Catalina upgrade is just too much of a risk. On top of all the previous Catalina woes Apple should be hanging their heads in shame.

<comment><USER36> > Xcode 11.4

your probably not missing much, there are some serious regressings in that release, for example [0]

[0] [https://forums.swift.org/t/swift-5-2-struct-property- wrapper...](https://forums.swift.org/t/swift-5-2-struct-property-wrapper- didset-defect/34403/3)

(for me, cant make release builds because the compiler crashes... sigh...)

<comment><USER37> You're missing the ability to connect to and debug on iOS 13.4 devices, I believe:

[https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/130988](https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/130988)

So now I'm stuck on 10.14.6 _and_ iOS 13.3.1, one of which is not getting security updates.

Really hoping Fuschia or someone steps up and displaces Apple.

<comment><USER38> What??? Xcode 11.4 requires Catalina now?? That's nuts.

<comment><USER39> Over the last few years Xcode has dropped support for older versions of macOS very aggressively. It requires upgrading to a new major version within the year that the new version came out, and quite often requires the latest minor version as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think that Apple should take advantage of the lockdowns and focus just on fixing things.

They don't need to ship anything new and they have the perfect excuse to focus on improving both their OS and their processes that allowed such flawed things to reach their users.

<comment><USER41> I wish macOS would just drop back to major releases every 2-3 years. Sure, drop a point release in September to add compatibility with whatever new feature iOS has gained, but my Mac is the computer I do work on. I need it to always be reliable.

Right now it seems the only way to do that is wait a long time before installing any update they push.

<comment><USER38> I absolutely agree. The action of pushing out major updates every year has lead to a drop in quality. They never get a chance to fix last years bugs because they are working on next years features.

<comment><USER15> That's not a fundamental issue though. Chrome pushes new features every six weeks. Android updates every year and doesn't suffer these kinds of problems.

You absolutely _can_ do regular updates that are high quality. You just can't do them in an environment that's deadline driven, or which gives PMs too much power over what dev teams work on.

<comment><USER38> You are comparing a browser to an entire operating system (and I believe Android does have those problems).

But you do have a point: it should be product driven not feature driven.

<comment><USER15> Browsers get closer to operating systems all the time, for better or worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Avi-D-coder Why is Catalina so unstable, were there major architectural changes? I know they broke Nix, ssh and a few others, but why?

<comment><USER19> Depends on what you're looking at, but on the whole Catalina probably has more aggressive changes than Mojave did.

<comment><USER42> And what has users gained by that? For the past 5 years or so, I don't exactly know anything worth it from users' perspective. Getting third party app updates are enough to increase productivity.

<comment><USER20> One of the high-impact changes (which broke Nix as the grand-grand parent mentioned) was moving / to a read-only volume:

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT210650)

Although this change may not be immediately visible it does increase security a fair bit (malware cannot embed themselves or replace system files) and also prevents accidental deletion.

Apple made large strides in the last few years improving security, e.g. by introducing SIP, but also by offering fine-grained permissions for camera, mic, etc. access. APFS created its own road bumps, but was a long overdue replacement of HFS+.

IMO there were also some nice user-visible changes, such as dark mode, replacing iTunes by several separate applications, and dynamic desktop.

I agree that there are also superfluous changes or steps back, I am still grumpy that they replaced Spaces by Mission Control. I don't care for all the deep iCloud Drive integration and think it is unfair to the competition.

I strongly disagree that there are no useful new features the last five years. The problem is more the lack of quality control. That said, I started using macOS when 10.5 came out, which also had its fair share of ugly bugs (e.g. serious problems with maintaining WiFi connections).

<comment><USER43> > I am still grumpy that they replaced Spaces by Mission Control

Can you elaborate? This terrifies me as I rely a lot on Spaces to organise my desktop between different projects

Is this a change in Catalina?

Is seems like Spaces is still a thing: [https://support.apple.com/en- gb/guide/mac-help/mh35798/mac](https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac- help/mh35798/mac) [https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac- help/mh14112/10.15...](https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac- help/mh14112/10.15/mac/10.15)

I'm pretty happy with how this works in Mojava, apart from the major gripe that the apps don't restore to the Space they were in after you reboot.

<comment><USER38> > Is this a change in Catalina?

No this was done years ago in 10.7. Spaces was awesome and super configurable. But they combined it into Mission control and made it much simple but less useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is this something especially prevalent in this update? Pretty much every single one borks _someone 's_ Mac, so I'm curious if there's something new: this article seemed light on details.

</comment><comment><USER44> I had a problem with the latest iOS update too: after installing 13.4.1 it booted to a white screen with "swipe up to upgrade" at the bottom. Swiping up crashed the device. Every couple of minutes it would reboot and be back to the white screen.

I did a factory reset via finder and that worked. As soon as I restored the iCloud backup: back to the white screen.

I had to revert to 13.4 and could then restore the backup. Now I'm afraid to update again … I guess I'll have to wait until 13.4.2 or 14 are released. Luckily 13.4.1 does not seem to contain security relevant fixes.

<comment><USER45> 13.4 failed on my phone and I had to do a manual clean restore via my Mac. Then 13.4.1 did the same thing and this time I had to do a DFU restore to get it functioning again. Not fun when taking it in to get it fixed is not an option.

I'm still getting freezes on my brand new 2019 MBP due to the still unfixed GPU switching bug and I don't dare install any macOS updates now.

Apple has had a lot of software quality issues in recent years but this is a new low.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I can confirm that the revive via DFU works. It also works over normal USB (instead of usb-c) connector as I used my gf older mac pro late 2015. Be aware that you need at least Mojave 10.14.6+ as the app configurator can't be run/installed on previous versions. There is also a big difference in App configurator 2.10 vs the latest 2.12. On 2.10 (you can find dmg file on internet, but be careful about running untrusted software) you can restore BridgeOS on the chip without wiping the data. In version 2.12 it will wipe all data!

Initially, I tried to restore the system via Virtualbox where I installed Mojave via Apple Configurator but that didn't work as it break during the revival of the last step because of the constant USB de-plugging from host/guest machine during the process. I think just the revival step in 2.12 should also work as it flashes also the bridge os and power it up which should avoid any data loss but don't take this for granted.

</comment><comment><USER47> Wonder if this update could be related to an issue I had.

Installed Snap Camera a few days ago, was on a video call and when I came off it the green camera light stayed on. Even after quitting Hangouts and Snap Camera.

I restarted and the green light persisted throughout the whole reboot. I then shutdown, and it finally turned off.

After turning it back on, the camera didn't work at all. I uninstalled Snap Camera, reset PRAM, SMC. Nothing seems to fix it. Now thinking it must be a hardware fault, but think I was on the latest update already and just seems like a strange coincidence that it happened almost immediately after I used Snap Camera for the first time.

</comment><comment><USER48> I've updated my MacBook Pro 2019 before I saw the HN post, the updated went smoothly without any issues (so far).

I've done the same update on my Mac Mini 2018 and now the fan has stopped working after reboot. Tried to reset NVRAM and SMC without any luck... the fan is still unresponsive. Apple diagnostics even confirms this by giving an error code PPF003

<comment><USER49> My mid-2015 mac (last REAL MacBook IMO) won't install it at all.

It says it's installing, I reboot, it does some stuff, then I come back and the update isn't applied.

Quality stuff!

<comment><USER50> If it's any consolation, I really like the keyboard on this latest air. Gave me reason to move off my 2012, the REAL last real macbook imo with everything replaceable/upgrade-able with a Phillips head screwdriver and 20 minutes of your time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Side poll: Do people automatically download OS updates for their computers? A lesson from my Windows days way back when was never to update anything unless absolutely needed -- computer, phones, etc. "Needed" is loosely defined as "key software that you need to work is no longer working on your older OS, hence you need to upgrade your OS to keep using this key software (sorry!)."

I'm aware of security patches etc, but risk of regular things breaking for little apparent upside has always led me (and most folks I know) to avoid upgrades except in the above-mentioned case.

 __Edit, not just asking about Windows, but all operating systems, OSX, iOS, Android, Linux, etc.

<comment><USER52> > A lesson from my Windows days way back when was never to update anything > unless absolutely needed -- computer, phones, etc.

Windows 10 seems to be pretty good at keeping its users on the latest version? (Unless you actively tell it, not to?)

<comment><USER53> Yes and because they have a bug with egpu they introduced in August, I had to go in Group policy to disable updates until they finally release a fix or my eGPU won't work (it's in beta apparently and will come out after 11 months)... And I was complaining about Apple but this is even worse...

<comment><USER54> > And I was complaining about Apple but this is even worse...

So a driver bug, affecting a single external device, is worse than completely bricking an entire machine?

Microsoft have had their share of controversies with updates (recent memory is deleting user data folder before they halted the rollout), but they have never made a machine unresponsive to the degree of the multiple anecdotes in this comment section.

HN has some smart folks, but the leeway those folks afford Apple despite their continuous hostile and incompetent behavior is incredible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I'm not sure this is an issue specific to this update. The very same description in the Apple forums matches what happened on my work Macbook Pro (a 2018 one if I'm not mistaken) while installing a different update a few months ago.

I won't say this is not an issue specific to this supplemental update, but I'm not buying it is _yet_.

It looks like one of the usual consequences of a system update going wrong. See that the user reports that after fixing this through Recovery Mode, they were asked to install the very same update again, as if nothing had happened. This looks like a rollback.

I wish MacOS was more transparent about what actually happens on those cases. If you had to roll back, let me know. If you could not install because of any reason, let me know.

<comment><USER56> Apple has historically been lacking on proper documentation. Be that on errors happening during updates or proper documentation of what exactly they have changed in software updates. They have slightly improved, but still not great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This really sucks. Can't use the new Xcode without Catalina but this release sounds so buggy.

<comment><USER35> Yes, there's no way Catalina is ever going on any of my machines. Apple has hit a real low-point with this release.

<comment><USER58> Just an anecdote but it's been rock solid for me and fixed a number of issues I had with Mojave.

<comment><USER59> Ditto. My worst problem has been that some games on Steam claim they don't work on Mojave... but they do.

<comment><USER60> This is due to Steam adding a new checkbox that requires the game's developer to specifically click an extra checkbox to signify compatibility with Catalina (and optionally, specify if the binary is notarized and/or signed [don't recall which, or is possibly both]).

Steam almost always already knows if the game has a '64-bit macOS depot' configured -- ie ships 64-bit binary for macOS -- though in some cases the 'depot' may be configured as "macOS - All" in which case Steam may not know for sure.

When Catalina released, they defaulted the checkbox to "No" regardless of the game depot configuration. Any remotely recent game that supports macOS almost certainly is shipping a 64-bit binary (been quite a while since OSX was 32-bit only) -- so odds are very good that games supporting macOS will work with macOS Catalina, at least likely for anything in the last 5 years if not longer.

In our case, it took several weeks to find the checkbox to update our store page. In all fairness, Valve sent out an email alerting of the concern ahead of time; we just didn't read it thoroughly enough to realize that the default setting would be "No" even when explicitly having a 64-bit macOS binary configured.

<comment><USER61> You clearly over-estimate your competitors. Plenty of games I have, will not work on Catalina - they are 32bit apps and devs have long moved on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Well, I've upgraded my personal macbook to Catalina (this update) and nothing seems wrong... yet.

OTOH, my work machine (a 2016 Macbook Pro) is stuck on Mojave (due to incompatible third-party software) and the latest "Security Update 2020-002" broke video conferencing. Right in the middle of a pandemic forcing everybody to work from home!

Of course, this being Apple, I'm not holding my breath for a fix anytime soon. They don't seem to release individual updates anymore, and even these bundled "Supplemental Updates" are few and far between.

Apple really needs to get its act together regarding macOS. People need macOS to actually be productive, unless they'd rather lose this segment completely to Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER63> It's not "bricked" if you can fix it in Recovery Mode.

Still bad that it's happening, but the term "bricked" is thrown around so flippantly these days. If a piece of tech is bricked, it's not recoverable at all.

<comment><USER64> "Bricked" is relative, depending on your skill level.

For some consumers, if recovery mode doesn't work that might be the end of line.

However, there are more advanced users that can access the storage via another system and fix it there, hook up via serial port or JTAG and flash new firmware, or even desolder and replace chips.

On the far other end of the spectrum, there's going to be people that consider "doesn't show the normal UI after I press the power button" as bricked.

<comment><USER65> If you go that route, "bricked" is now indistinguishable from "broke," and we already have a word for that. Broke. We would have then gone from a situation where we had two different states and names for each of those states to a situation where we have two words for the very same, very fuzzy state and no way to talk about the _other_ state.

It makes a mockery of the idea of advice. Imagine your parents calling you and telling you that their machine is bricked. Well, I guess they must buy a new one and the old must go to electronic recycling. No need for a diagnostic of any kind, it's bricked.

Linguistic descriptivism will be the death of communication and standards. Only pushing back at the creep will allow people to discuss anything technical. Imagine the trend should it overtake medicine. If a certain kind of stroke is suspected, the patient should take aspirin right away. No, _aspirin_ -aspirin, not ibuprofen. Then you have someone who says, "Well, ibuprofen is an aspirin sure!"

<comment><USER66> Bricked, to me, means it is _physically_ just fine, but it doesn't work due to some kind of software issue.

"I bricked my phone and had to spend a whole day reading obscure guides to three different levels of embedded software before I could get it working again" feels like a perfectly valid sentence. You can fix a bricked thing, just like you can fix a broken thing, but both require some investment of time and possibly the use of tools that you won't usually find outside the hands of specialists.

<comment><USER67> I don't agree.

imo "Bricked" means you turned your piece of electronics into a brick, it cannot be recovered. Otherwise as mentioned before, it's just "broken", which can be recovered from in most cases.

<comment><USER68> > a brick, it cannot be recovered.

A bricked device usually _can_ be recovered using only software tools and sometimes a special cable. Sometimes those tools or cables are only possessed by the manufacturer, which frustrates consumers and makes it seem like the devices are unrecoverable, but they're not.

A broken device, on the other hand, can't be recovered using software tools or a special cable because it contains broken parts that must be repaired or replaced.

<comment><USER69> A physically broken device might still be functional though, so personally your terms are backwards.

A bricked device has a slight chance of recovery, if you have the tools/skills/training. It is a brick until that repair with high applitude is completed. Something that is broke doesn't mean it is functional or not, just not at a perfectly working condition to worse. it might be repaired by doing a reset of a device, or something more advanced.

This is from my experience dealing with non-technical people who are mechanically inclined, but not technically inclined. they will call with a "broke" device that just needs a reset since they have too many users in a system all attempting to run the same device on different things. (Sorry keeping vague to keep me out of hot water). They will also call in with something "bricked" because the device won't function due to a damaged USB port, and they don't have the skill set/components to solder a port on something electronic. And then further down the scale it is a paperweight when it won't boot and is a piece of hardware they hate.

<comment><USER68> I disagreed with GP's use of the term bricked to mean unrecoverable. You seem to agree with me because you wrote that a bricked device can be recovered with the proper tools/skills/training. I hadn't considered partially-working devices, but I think you're right that they shouldn't be properly called bricked.

The threads here show that even highly technical people disagree on what conditions should be considered bricked versus broken. To a non-technical person whose device isn't working, however, there is no practical difference.

<comment><USER67> I actually changed my mind a little after posting that comment. I think it was mentioned elsewhere also, but even something that I would consider "bricked" could still probably be recovered by someone with access to the right tools (ability to reflash via JTAG, replacing chips etc.)

I would refine my definition to be that a "bricked" device is something that has occurred via a failed software update making the device inoperable to all but the tiniest subset of users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I have a MacBook 12" 2017 and have not encountered any serious issue with 10.15.4 supplemental update, yet..

I do however note that when adjusting volume in the status bar the UI dragbar position is very jumpy, which gives a rather unpolished impression.

<comment><USER71> > when adjusting volume in the status bar the UI dragbar position is very > jumpy

I've noticed this as well. Qualitatively, it seems to be worse when external audio output devices are selected, than for the Internal Speakers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Eh. I'm so happy to now be alone. I really hope they'll hear it. I just sent my brand new MBP 16" back to Apple, because I believe that's what happened to me too. 2 weeks ago Friday an update fetched overnight messed me up--upon starting I got an installer with "27 minutes to go", then a login screen, and upon a login with my password, I got a pure-white-screen for 2-5s, then 2s of max-fan speed, and an instant reboot.

And it went on to happen in the loop: login -> white screen -> reboot.

Recovery mode + macOS reinstall = "Can't install macOS on this computer"

To my that starts to match the definition of "bricked" already, because a normal person really can't probably recover from this at that point.

Recovery mode (booted via USB drive) = "Installer is missing assets" (tried 2 USB drives, after re-downloading Catalina installer

Recovery mode (booted via USB drive with Mojave) = this is not supported anymore

Recovery mode -> Disk Utility -> First Aid -> run a FS check, turned out APFS volume is corrupted ("fsroot tree is invalid")...

Target mode (went to BestBuy to get a special "SS+" certified USB-C cable, because of course a normal cable doesn't work) connected to my macOS Catalina Mac mini -> couldn't unencrypted the APFS partition enough though the password was correct. Read every possible target mode tutorial, and there's no mention about what Catalina did to Recovery Keys/User (other than them simply not being there), but you need to pass a UUID of a recovery used, and I only had some iCloud Recovery Keys there. Tried my MacBook password, my iCloud password etc. Nothing worked. Basically I couldn't un-encrypt the drive.

Ended up just starting Recovery Mode again, mounting a separate USB disk from the Terminal, copied valuable stuff over.

Removed all APFS volumes, tried to re-install on a fresh volumes. Nothing worked. Was getting the same issues from the installer. Gave up. Packed this $4k computer and sent it back to Apple. Writing this from my Mac mini, with Catalina, happily rejecting any updates. BTW, Catalina installer is a joke. It is broken since Catalina came out, and it's not getting any better.

</comment><comment><USER73> For me the installation got stuck. Had to try twice

</comment><comment><USER74> They're earning billions yet can't afford to keep 5 mac books of each type in different configurations in one room and person or computer who will launch update before release and report green light. As always whatever size of company testing is a bottleneck because having roughly 25 computers and testing room is a problem. What a wonderful world.

<comment><USER75> As I understand it, not all components are sourced from the same manufacturer for the entire run of any one model.

But you're still absolutely right. They should be testing every possible configuration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> I am having serious problems with WiFi. I have about six apple devices and my home wlan works perfectly for all of them except my MacBook Pro. It connects and then in some minutes there is no internet. No packets in no packets out. Tried everything.

Tomorrow I do a hard reset. Nice way to spend my Easter holidays.

</comment><comment><USER77> The quality of Apple's Apple's and software has been on a gentle downward trend since about 2015.

I still prefer them for now, but eventually the cost/benefit ratio just won't make sense anymore. If I'm paying for crappy quality, I'd rather just buy cheap.

</comment><comment><USER78> This is what happens when you focus on features over functionality, get excited over "delighting" your customers over providing reliable products, and put visibility over stability. Steve Jobs had a nice balance of this, Tim Cook is just a numbers guy.

</comment><comment><USER79> I installed it on my 16" yesterday - haven't seen any of the issues in the article yet.

</comment><comment><USER80> Since my power cord frayed (no strain relief due to aesthetics) to the point that it will no longer charge, my laptop has been off for a week.

I've been protected from a major flaw by another, equally major flaw.

I guess it's better than the alternative of getting hit by them both.

</comment><comment><USER81> Ugh. My 2018 i9 has been freezing randomly recently. I actually rushed to install the most recent update hoping it would fix the freezing. It hasn't and now I gotta worry about this. I regret upgrading to Catalina. Nothing but problems since.

</comment><comment><USER82> I am tracking the issue here.

[https://mrmacintosh.com/10-15-4-supplemental-update- bricking...](https://mrmacintosh.com/10-15-4-supplemental-update-bricking- small-number-of-t2-macs/)

</comment><comment><USER83> None of our 5 macs at home have Catalina installed. We will stay with Mojave for the foreseeable future.

It seems Apple is finally getting their shit together on the Mac hardware front. Now they need to do the same for macOS.

Moving to yearly macOS releases was a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER84> I have been lucky thus far, I suppose. Before I run the updates, I disconnect all peripherals (Bluetooth devices, external monitors) and even close out all active applications.

The two events are likely unrelated but so far has not failed me.

</comment><comment><USER85> I had to send my mac in for repair. Horrifyingly painful during Corona. And they stole my graphics card (repair removed the graphics card), and reset back to Mojave. I had to chance re-installing Catalina myself.

</comment><comment><USER86> Truly terrible time with everyone working from home without tech support.

</comment><comment><USER87> I just installed the update yesterday and now I'm seeing this.

Mine is working so far

</comment><comment><USER88> Was going to update today, I guess I am going to be on my current 10.15.2 for a long time. 10.15.2 is quite stable and runs smooth enough with occasional freezes happening maybe once a month.

</comment><comment><USER89> Does it have any impact on the display? Well, roughly the lower half-inch portion of my display gets crazy randomly. Mine is a 13 inch 2017 MacBook Pro. Any remarks guys?

</comment><comment><USER90> Apple killed my 2015 macbook pro like this. Rebooted for update and never turned on again. No smc or recovery options worked. Completely bricked and also out of warranty.

</comment><comment><USER91> New 2019 16in MBP, luckily worked fine on my machine (and an old 2013 13in MBP).

Sounds like a real pickle for those affected, though. v_v

</comment><comment><USER92> It's a good thing I always click later on these updates.. has Apple retracted this patch?

</comment><comment><USER93> One data point here - my late 2013 MacBook Pro (ME864LL/A) is fine with 10.15.4

</comment><comment><USER94> I thought it was just me!

</comment><comment><USER95> Yesterday my MacBook Pro (2018, Model "MacBookPro15,1") updated itself, and I've had no problems. I'm at macOS 10.15.4 (19E287). Is this the latest version?

</comment><comment><USER96> I've never seen an OS update brick a PC.

Linux or Windows, doesn't matter - you can always recover via BIOS.

How can Apple users live with crap like this?

</comment><comment><USER97> Are people not using auto-update?

<comment><USER98> Why would I want to wake up in the morning to find my laptop not working?

This issue is exactly why I only occasionally install updates, and if I do I wait a while for the canaries to leave the coal mine. I've been a user of macOS, distros of Linux, and Windows for years, and in every one of them there was the inevitable update that made the OS unusable. It happens rarely but, when it does, it's a miserable experience.

<comment><USER99> Interested in hearing about a Linux update that made the system unusable.

<comment><USER100> Are you kidding? I've had config files overwritten, x11/wayland/whatever just break after an update, wirelesss/power drivers just...change, sometimes to the point of having to recover it from a mono-screen tty, or updates fuck up the fs or something else that requires me to hit up single user mode.

<comment><USER98> Yeah, I got a black screen on boot on more than one occasion because of some change to either X11 or its config after updating. It's probably a rite of passage for a seasoned Linux user to figure out how to undo the damage to their `/etc/x11/xorg.conf`. (then again, I stopped using linux about 4 years ago, so maybe that's changed)

<comment><USER101> It has changed, yes. Most people don't even have an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file anymore; it's all autodetected now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> Still on 10.15.3

Just disabled auto-update. Phew.

</comment><comment><USER103> Well, not bricked you just lose your data. That data that most people don't have backups for.

<comment><USER19> Where does it say that you lose your data?

<comment><USER104> I was hit by this bug, my entire unit was fucked and I had to use Recovery over the Internet to reinstall a fresh OS on my 2019 MacBook Pro. Nearly everything on my Mac was dot sourced, on Git or using my local NAS' TimeMachine share. All the same, all my data on the Mac was still lost and had to be restored using backup.

<comment><USER19> Reinstalling the OS shouldn't wipe your data partition…

<comment><USER105> At least in the default install, it is all one partition. Moreover, if you had disk encryption or something, getting the recovery keys would be a risk even you had followed all the right steps. Granted, none of these are good excuses for not doing TM backups since those are so easy. But just saying people could lose data and not have an easy way to recover it.

<comment><USER11> This is not true in Catalina.

1\. [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT210650)

<comment><USER105> Thanks for the pointer. I hadn't heard about this at all!

<comment><USER104> Well, I lost all my data. I have an empty relocated items dir on my desktop.

Edit: there's a Configuration dir in Recovered Items which has two other dirs, a private dir which contains another etc dir which contains a shells default file. Nothing else.

Unsure why this didn't help me at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> Why i cannot find any ergonomic keyboard for mac?

</comment><comment><USER107> I suspect [http://n-gate.com/](http://n-gate.com/) is gonna roast this post's comments.

<comment><USER107> LOL n-gate trolls referrals from here. That's brilliant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> I'm consistently amazed by HN's ability to take the most meaningless, inconsequential part of an article (the scroll behavior, the whitespace, the usage of the word "bricked"), and nitpick it to hell and back instead of actually discussing the article.

Bravo.

<comment><USER109> Brown M&Ms ([https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/232420](https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/232420)). How am I supposed to assume your content is of any quality if you cannot get the details right?

<comment><USER110> Typical HN response, there is no multi-million dollar exchange going on here. How about filling in some of the blanks or correct the wrong parts yourself? This is such an unnecessary defensive response.

<comment><USER111> Great I love this response!

People go into Karen mode here, yes they bought expensive piece of hardware with expensive operating system. Though site is rather technically minded they still underestimate how complex are those things.

It just another "Dropbox? Who needs that I can do the same in an hour", but somehow they don't realize when you have a budget, timelines and as always not enough developers who understand this specific thing - it is different than sitting on your own and making perfect thing. (which then if scrutinized by some other dev would be labeled as crap :D)

<comment><USER112> Especially when it's a developing story and probably published in a rush (in less than ideal situations). Mistakes happen and the informative side is more important at these times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> I'm consistently amazed by HN's ability to take the most meaningless, inconsequential part of an article (the scroll behavior, the whitespace, the usage of the word "bricked"), and nitpick it to hell and back instead of actually discussing the article.

Bravo.

</comment><comment><USER114> I was bored, so after reading the thread here, I did the update anyway. iOS, too.

No problems, still bored.

</comment><comment><USER115> I thought they were bricked from the factory because of the shit keyboard that only works in clean room conditions.

And I'm not talking hearsay here, I own one and the keyboard is as shitty as the entire internet says. Comparing to my previous MacBooks that had no keyboard problems when used outdoors too.</comment>


Your Mouse is Obsolete: 4 Perceptual Computing Finalists - <AUTHOR> http://neatocode.tumblr.com/post/55278831441/your-mouse-is-obselete-perceptual-computing

<comment><AUTHOR> Looking forward to the rest of the challenge. Is anyone else in the finals?

</comment><comment><USER2> Congrats on getting 4 submissions into the finals!</comment>


Ten Helpful User Interface Design Patterns - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/23/10-ui-design-patterns-you-should-be-paying-attention-to/

<comment><USER2> While this is a decent reminder of some reasonably current UI trends (and some very old ones - just check a few of the form-oriented items in this list), I'd guess that most HN readers are familiar with all of these concepts.

I'm somewhat tickled to see "sign-up forms must die" as the first item, but then a feature about giant, prominent sign-up forms appears farther down. Hm.</comment>


Urban heat islands and street trees in Philadelphia - <AUTHOR> http://urbanspatialanalysis.com/urban-heat-islands-street-trees-in-philadelphia/ <comment><USER2> Hooray for GIS! It's truly amazing that in this day and age, this quality of data, and the computing power to crunch it, is available to the average user sitting on their couch with a laptop.

Some things I'd like to see: 1\. I've generally seen heat islands referring to not so much getting hotter on a hot day, but staying warmer on a cold day, or at night -- this is one reason why cities get rain when the suburbs get snow, especially in the mid-Atlantic. Would like to test whether trees impact that.

2\. I'm concerned from a statistical perspective that trees vs. no trees could be strongly correlated with other variables that might be more causative, like building type and density. Would like to see a paired comparison of areas in the city that are otherwise very similar, with the only difference being more vs. less trees.

Not complaining at all; the author is laying out the tools. Time for me or someone else to pick them up and investigate further ...

<comment><USER3> > I'm concerned from a statistical perspective that trees vs. no trees could > be strongly correlated with other variables that might be more causative, > like building type and density.

Wasn't that why he mentioned using the tree request program, to provide controls?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a little confused. The image that's captioned "Land surface temperature, Philadelphia" (top label: "Landsat 8 derived land temperature") is that estimated or measured? Because it sounds like the hot spots were detected by taking a satellite image and looking for places that "looked" hot, but then it's presented like those places really were hotter?

A little later, he says the black warehouses were located under the really hot spots. But weren't the really hot spots determined by finding all the black spots in the image?

<comment><USER5> Landsat 8 has 11 different imaging bands, and 2 of them (bands 10 and 11) are thermal infrared bands just for measuring heat.

For more info, see this Landsat 8 cheatsheet (written by my awesome coworker Charlie Loyd): [http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/?page_id=5377](http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/?page_id=5377)

<comment><USER6> > Our calibration team has found that with current processing these surface > brightness temperatures are accurate to within ~±1 K for many 15 – 35° C > targets, e.g., growing season vegetated targets.

Wow, I would have never expected that!

Dump European question: ±1 K is the same as ±1° C, right?

<comment><USER7> > Dump European question: ±1 K is the same as ±1° C, right?

Yes the intervals are identical, the only difference is the scale's starting point. In fact although that's discouraged papers often use Celsius absolutes and Kelvin intervals, as is the case here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> According to this data, I don't want to live in such cities. I get that for some people those pools of houses and people in a small area are nice, but for me, in the information age, it doesn't make much sense anymore to live in a crowded area with all the amplified problems people have when stacked on top of each other.

<comment><USER9> But at the same time, rural and suburban living have their own problems. You lose economies of scale when it comes to rolling out new technology (fiber, cable, etc). Residents have to drive more. Transportation of goods/services costs more. Some jobs (services) require you to be on-site - straight up software development is one of a few that doesn't require any live face-time (but even that goes away as soon as you move into executive management or sales).

The real answer seems to be somewhere in the middle. Well-planned urban areas should be able to mitigate much of the heat island effect. And if the suburbs are reigned in (and replaced with a more natural environment, with more plant- life, etc), we should see some benefits in the overall environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Forests create their own microclimate that stabilises temperatures during the day _and night_ \- meaning it doesn't cool down as quickly as an open field. So I would expect trees to also make a city more pleasant during nighttime.

</comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't everybody know that trees bring down the temperature?

We can resume the article in a phrase " on average, for an additional 100 trees in a census tract, land surface temperature decreases 0.3 degrees."

But it has nice graphics.

<comment><USER12> > Doesn't everybody know that trees bring down the temperature?

No.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would love to see a similar analysis of New York City. I am working with the City on figuring where to plant how many trees.

<comment><USER14> They seem to be offering their services for cases just like that, so if you throw some money at them they will probably give you what you need.</comment></comment>


Show HN : resolving part of Linus Torvald's problem with github - text wrapping - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-21850647

<comment><USER2> Has anybody looked through the comments from Linus? Pretty arrogant. I hope he only had a bad day otherwise people with a different opinion around him will have a hard time.

 _Btw, Joseph, you 're a quality example of why I detest the github interface. For some reason, github has attracted people who have zero taste, don't care about commit logs, and can't be bothered.

The fact that I have higher standards then makes people like you make snarky comments, thinking that you are cool.

You're a moron.

                       Linus*

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually pretty standard of Linus :)

Most of the time, he's not that rude. But when he thinks someone is wrong, he reacts with very offensive comments (especially if the person try to insist to prove her point).

That's some kind of terrorism management : nobody would dare make an error while working on the kernel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi oelmekki, two questions:

\- What's the idea: do you want Github to treat repositories that have a config file named, say, github_commit_policy, and then run your Javascript on the relevant repo pages?

\- You announced your patch to the Github team 2 days ago, according to the linked page: have you heard anything?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Basically, the plugin should be ran on any textarea that produces mail content or commits, so that they respect the 72 characters convention, even when not produced from a mail client or with git/vim.

2\. They thanked me for showing them the project, but didn't mentioned anything about using it or not using it.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. So you only see this as a browser plugin, not something that should be served by Github.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's two parts, here : the jquery plugin and the browser extension.

I would love github to implement the jquery plugin on relevant textareas, thus automatically providing sane wrapping by default.

The browser extension is to allow users to get this feature right now, and in case that github finally doesn't use the jquery plugin. This would not provide wrapping by default for everyone, but at least those who want it can have it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Malvertising Campaign of Secrets and Lies - <AUTHOR> https://research.checkpoint.com/malvertising-campaign-based-secrets-lies/ <comment><AUTHOR> good research but silly hypothesis on the "conclusion". if any money was going from malware advertisers to master134 (the entity hacking wordpress blogs to make them show ads), they would show the "ads" directly without all those middle mans.

more likely the adnetwork and the resellers know very well the traffic and advertisers are malicious. but they are "partners" and want a share of this revenue. probably they even came up with the scheme, and not the bad actors.

adterra flag both the bad sites and bad ad campaigns either explicitly as criminal or via some misleading unique tag that will never be used, save to mark players in this scam.

now malware advertisers pay AdTerra and its resellers like every other advertiser. And adterra shows their ads on the tainted inventory. and pay the "owner" of the inventory, master134.</comment>


First Impressions – Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL - <AUTHOR> http://penningpence.blogspot.com/2017/03/first-impressions-google-cloud-sql-for.html <comment><USER2> Just to add my two cents here.

I've been using cloud SQL now through the weekend for a private alpha product that receives under 20,000 requests per day right now.

Im currently running this in conjunction with GKE and I have to say it's really solid. The sql proxy setup was very simple, very easy, and overall a great experience.

I'm looking forward to replication and support for PostGIS extensions, which I hope will come over the next five to six months. Best of luck to the Cloud SQL team.

Let me know if anyone has some questions.

<comment><USER3> PostGIS is the first extension listed on Google's page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To add to the "Security" section: Google's cloud SQL offerings run over the public network. With Google Cloud MySQL, you must whitelist IPs or configure strong authentication and TLS to stay protected, even if connecting from VMs in the same project. The is no "vpc"-like option.

<comment><USER5> That's how Google rolls nowadays: [http://www.networkworld.com/article/2922061/cisco- subnet/goo...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2922061/cisco- subnet/google-network-security-sans-perimeter.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure if the author is limited by his trial account but to get more than 6.5GB of memory you need to dial up the number of cores which then gives you up to 64 cores and 416 GB memory</comment>


Ask HN: Need a designer?  - <AUTHOR>

I'm a 17 year old designer looking to explore my trade. I recently quit my retail job, and I'm looking to build my skills with the time I have to spare. I'll design anything for $10/hr.
Here's my portfolio: http://www.joek.dunked.com
if you're interested, contact me - email@example.com <comment><USER2> At $10/hr you'll only attract the worst kind of clients: those who think that your time is not valuable, that will try to scam you, that will try to get you to do stuff for free.

You'll also have the problem that freelancing at $10/hr simply isn't sustainable. Keep in mind that you have to do your taxes and probably need help with that, need equipment, etc. I assume you still live at home so you don't have expenses like rent, food, insurances, pension payments, etc.

That being said, good luck. And keep doubling your prices as soon as you get more work than you want to handle.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've sent a email to you, I've 17 years old too and I'm developing some startup in Brazil. I'm looking for a good designer to work with me, becoming my partner.</comment>


Mosh: the mobile shell - <AUTHOR> https://mosh.mit.edu/ <comment><USER3> > _Mosh (and its tolerance for high packet loss) helps Iain Learmonth escape > from an elevator._

Um, wow! [https://mosh.mit.edu/elevator.txt](https://mosh.mit.edu/elevator.txt)

<comment><USER4> Hey, never, but never, go out of an elevator that isn't leveled in the floor. By the description, I understand that he jumped from the elevator. If the elevator started to move, he could have been cut in half. This happened other day in my city.

If you are stuck in a elevator, wait for professional help to take you out.

<comment><USER5> I once dreamt I was cut in half by a lift. It was not at all fun, so I'd definitely follow this advice :-D

The other piece of lift related advice (that I really enjoy saying in more crowded, rickety lifts): I once read if in a lift that is falling you should attempt to lie flat on the bottom of the lift to limit the impact - <USER2> on top of another human. Some hacker news physicist will prove me apocryphal here I'm sure...

<comment><USER6> If an elevator is falling for long enough to give you time to recognize the situation, recall this strategy, and actually lie prone upon the floor (in ~0G, somehow)… it's not going to matter.

<comment> vhost- You both should watch the elevator hacking talk that was given at HOPE X: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUvGfuLlZus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUvGfuLlZus)

<comment><USER7> Seconding this: I like to put hacker con talks on in the background while I do other things, and this was the most entertaining panel from HOPE X in my opinion

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Termux[0], the best Android terminal emulator (in my humble opinion), recently had mosh added to its' package repository.

I currently use it and it's very nice. It makes me long for a better handheld though (my 4" Moto G screen is difficult to type on, even with Hacker's Keyboard).

I can have tmux sessions running on servers with say, an irc client running, mosh in, chat away for a bit, turn it off, the irc client continues running. Perfect. Same for e-mail using mutt, notes that are backed up on the server automatically using vim, etc etc. Really nice workflow.

Give me a handheld device with ssh/mosh support and I'm happy. :)

[0] [https://termux.com](https://termux.com) [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.termux](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.termux)

<comment><USER9> Have you tried JuiceSSH by any chance?

Curious how the two compare.

<comment><USER10> Another commentor expressed it, but JuiceSSH is proprietary. In most cases open source is more of a preference for me than a necessity, but I may need to sudo or access root over SSH, and there's no way to review closed source code. JuiceSSH (IMHO) has too much control over my computer for me to use it based on the assumption that I fully can trust the developer.

<comment><USER11> Agree. Really wish mosh support would be merged into standard ConnectBot. The linked build on the mosh site is hacked into an old version of an old ConnectBot fork.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've used mosh on and off for the past year. For me, the best feature of mosh is the support for roaming. For the "persistence" aspect, SSH + remote screen is sufficient.

There was a point where I used mosh whether I was roaming or sitting at my desk, but eventually the friction of mosh made it only worthwhile to use in roaming situations. By "friction" I mean the small annoyances of (1) installing mosh on every new server, and (2) requiring the use of screen to get scrollback buffers. I frequently use screen in my workflows outside of mosh, so I would often end up in weird states where I moshed into a server and auto-attached to my dedicated "moshscreen," but then had to detach from it within the session to move to another screen that I wanted to use.

Because of those annoyances, I now just use simple SSH when sitting at my desk, and put any long-running commands into a remote screen. But mosh is still extremely useful in two narrow cases: train rides (moving between cell towers) and traveling in developing countries (high packet loss).

</comment><comment><USER13> I've had great success with using JuiceSSH[0] for mosh on Android. Great for those times something important comes up and I'm away from my desk. Trying to connect without mosh on mobile networks is pretty terrible.

[0] [https://juicessh.com/](https://juicessh.com/)

<comment><USER14> ConnectBot is also cool.

<comment><USER15> You do have to install a patched version for mosh support, but for some reason I could never get JuiceSSH to connect to our mosh server so I've been using "mosh for irssi ConnectBot" from [http://dan.drown.org/android/mosh/](http://dan.drown.org/android/mosh/) for years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Love mosh, but having no scrollback is a pain. I can hack a solution by using screen on top of mosh. They say that version 1.3 will add support for scrollback.

<comment><USER17> I earlier tried running screen on top of mosh. But it did't worked for me. Can you tell how you exactly did it?

<comment><USER18> You run screen on the server side. mosh in, then screen. Works just fine.

<comment><USER16> And then you can use "Ctrl-A [" and arrows to scroll. Screen keeps a scroll buffer server side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> TL;DR: Install on both client and server, for ssh with better usability over mobile networks (3G/4G or spotty WiFi).

<comment><USER20> Also, you don't need root privileges to install it on the server side. You can just install it into your home directory, and run the client with --server=/home/you/bin/mosh-server. (It uses SSH for connection setup, and then communicates over UDP on a high-numbered port, so it doesn't need any privileged code.)

<comment><USER21> Anyone know if the UDP packets are encrypted?

<comment><USER22> Yes. They use AES-OCB. I've gone through the crypto myself, and while I am not an expert, it seems properly done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have been an extremely happy Mosh user for a while now. The feature I am missing the most is port forwarding. I looked into adding it myself at some point, but it wasn't entirely trivial because of how Mosh bundles together network-related concepts and higher-level stuff like optimistic typing. There is even a small bounty on it, I think :) [https://github.com/mobile- shell/mosh/issues/337](https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/issues/337)

</comment><comment><USER24> This beautiful little tool was what let me do contract work over a (frequently >10s roundtrip with >50% packet loss) 1-2kbps mobile uplink in rural West Africa. It's indispensable in such situations.

</comment><comment><USER25> Mosh is great, but I kind of stopped using it once I discovered Tmux so I could resume a session if the connection dropped.

It's not that Mosh does anything _wrong_ , but SSH has more features, and is supported by basically everything ever. Consequently, I stick with old-school SSH.

<comment><USER26> tmux complements mosh, it doesn't quite replace it. For me, the whole point is that you don't _have_ to "resume a session", it just happens.

On my laptop I have a mosh session open to my remote shell basically all the time. In situations with spotty net access, it's actually a pretty reliable "canary" that indicates whether I have any access at all.

<comment><USER27> This. Here's a handy zsh alias that I use:

        alias tmosh='() {mosh $* -- sh -c "tmux a || tmux"}'

so I can mosh into any of my ssh aliases and resume my tmux session seamlessly

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Still no proper IPv6 support. I use v6 almost exclusively to get to all my servers.

<comment><USER29> Curious on what advantages you see vs. using IPv6 Edit: IPv4 _

<comment><USER30> I'll chime in and say: Support for IPv6. It's ... self evident? I think we've reached a point that it's okay to call out a network client that doesn't support it.

<comment><USER29> I am not sure I understand. How is it self-evident? Is there a benefit over using mosh over IPv4? Performance, stability,anything else? Does it add anything to what mosh can do over IPv4. Is the benefit from the client end or the server end or in-between.

<comment><USER31> Well one benefit is that it works. Servers which don't have a v4 address are a thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I never realised people used mosh for persistence. I always use tmux (with my zshrc set up to automatically drop me into a default session) and use mosh so that I can write full commands while operating over a lossy connection. I would use mosh over Tor, but Tor doesn't route UDP. :(

</comment><comment><USER33> I use mosh daily and love it. It's great for moving around the office and maintaining a connection - no accidental hups, no real need to use screen or nohup.

My one beef with it is that it effectively defeats my terminal emulator's scroll bar. Need to scroll back the output? Nope. You have to use less or more profusely.

<comment><USER34> My solution to that is to run mosh on top of screen. tmux would also work.

<comment><USER35> Is mosh on top of screen or is screen on top of mosh? Serious question, since I share parent's love of mosh and frustration with the lack of scrollback.

<comment><USER36> Mosh to the server, then run screen/tmux there. You'll have to use the scroll features of screen/tmux. Running your stuff inside of screen/tmux is useful in any case.

<comment><USER12> As mentioned on the website, you can even attach to the screen directly from the mosh command:

        mosh pello -- screen -dr

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Mosh is great for low-connectivity environments. I just wish there was a decent iOS client for the protocol...

<comment><USER38> Well, we'll see. [https://github.com/blinksh/blink](https://github.com/blinksh/blink)

<comment><USER39> We are currently in a very advanced state, shooting for Beta soon. Follow us on @blinkshell [https://twitter.com/BlinkShell](https://twitter.com/BlinkShell) if you would like to have early access!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Pity it still does not support port forwarding transparently :/

[https://www.bountysource.com/issues/4471419-ssh-port- forward...](https://www.bountysource.com/issues/4471419-ssh-port-forwarding- doesn-t-work)

</comment><comment><USER41> Is this really news? Mosh has been around since 2012 and there haven't been releases in almost one year.

</comment><comment><USER42> SSHing my servers with my iPhone over LTE with Prompt w/o Mosh.

Same low latency as on desktop over WiFi, perfectly fine, light code editing in Vim is butter smooth. And if connection breaks I just get back to my tmux session. So, can anybody tell what I miss?

<comment><USER39> Speed and responsiveness. Mosh renders on the server sending only changes, so a Ctrl+C or a dump like dmesg is crazy fast. Prediction makes a server in a different country behave as if you were there. Also, although you mentioned the connection breaking, this happens in iOS a lot and ends up being a pain, having to tap the server again and again.

With Blink, which is Mosh for iOS (I'm the developer @BlinkShell [https://twitter.com/BlinkShell](https://twitter.com/BlinkShell)), you also get full keyboard support, with Caps as Ctrl, Alt as Meta, or any other combo you want to have. And a great terminal with full configuration of color themes, fonts, etc. beyond the standard included with the app. Everything a real terminal should have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is funny, mosh saved my day a few days ago to reliably access a workstation connected through Comcast Business from an ATT Uverse home connection... For some reason the SSH sessions break (timeout) every 2-3min. I tried everything, but after a random time between 2 and 4min packets for those sessions just disappear, despite ssh sessions between other networks being perfectly fine. Anyway mosh works like a charm now. I think it is where it shines: seamless access over high latency and/or unreliable networks.

</comment><comment><USER44> I have mostly gone back to plain ssh. mosh was fantastic for keeping a connection running across network changes and when accessing a plain command line it does feel a bit snappier on slow connections.

But screen or tmux give me persistence and re-establishing an ssh connection isn't very time consuming. A terminal multiplexer has a lot of advantages that mosh does not provide.

mosh adds another layer of terminal emulation and while the extra latency might not be a killer the terminal emulation can be as it is opaque to some features.

<comment><USER45> Why not just use mosh to establish & maintain the connection then then use tmux/screen to manage the terminal sessions?

<comment><USER46> Also wondering this. Why not both?

<comment><USER36> That's what I do. My laptop moshes into a tmux. It's like I'm just always connected to my servers; the network is abstracted away. Mosh even has a very useful "7 seconds since connection dropped" message for when the café WiFi lags etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm not sure what exactly what does it in my [https://github.com/kaihendry/dotfiles/blob/master/.ssh/confi...](https://github.com/kaihendry/dotfiles/blob/master/.ssh/config) but my ssh sessions are remarkably reliable across spotty 3G connections in Malaysia in a bus.

</comment><comment><USER48> I tried to use mosh, but it turned on really bad mobile network even it was not helpful. What surprisingly worked OK was Emacs shell plus lsyncd. With that I type commands locally and send the whole line on Enter while lsync transparently syncs my edits of local files to the server. Then I can live with latencies of over a second.

</comment><comment><USER49> mosh + zerotier = win for random home servers, imho

<comment><USER50> For anyone else that was curious, zerotier appears to be a virtual network tool, kind of like Hamachi but not run by a terrible company and with a much saner pricing scale.

<comment><USER51> It looks great, is open-source, and free for up to 10 devices. I've been using Hamachi, but I may switch.

<comment><USER52> It's actually free for unlimited use if you run your own network controller, see docs in /controller and /service on GitHub. There's now a 100 device free limit on my.zerotier.com which is just our hosted SaaS network controller.

(I'm the founder of ZeroTier)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Few HN posts propel me to even slightly alter my day to day workflow. Using Mosh instead of raw SSH is a huge win for me because much of my day is spent remoting into a server in Singapore from the US over Verizon 4G cellular data.

</comment><comment><USER54> Sadly, there's no indication of a proper protocol specification for the State Synchronization Protocol having been published in the four years since the authors suggested that SSP might be usable outwith just mosh.

</comment><comment><USER55> Is there a convenient way to run mosh-server on a box behind NAT a ProxyCommand?

<comment><USER12> There are some suggestions here:

[https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/issues/48](https://github.com/mobile- shell/mosh/issues/48)

My solution to this was for the box behind NAT to join a VPN, and then connect to it via its VPN address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> "Why use this instead of GNU screen?"

The low latency features really set this one apart. The smart local echo (it underlines unconfirmed predictions) make it much nicer to use over laggy mobile networks.

<comment><USER34> I would say they're mostly orthogonal. I use mosh _and_ screen.

<comment><USER56> That sounds like a scenario for long-form work over a mobile network (eg. on a laptop through a mobile hotspot).

Mosh from a laptop is a no-go for me because there's no Windows-based, full- featured terminal emulator (saved sessions, auth agents, etc) that supports mosh.

<comment><USER57> have you tried Mobaxterm for this? I've not used its mosh support but like it as a general SSH client...

<comment><USER56> I'm embarassed to say I haven't even heard of MobaXterm. This is going on my remote-work rig tonight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm not a security researcher, but somehow I suspect the "maintaining connection while switching networks" holds potential for a flaw.

<comment><USER20> Can you describe what you're worried about?

The connection is set up over SSH, and mosh-client generates a random AES-OCB key and sends it to mosh-server. Packets are sent over UDP, protected using authenticated encryption, and discarded if they fail integrity protection (which is fine, since packets could just be dropped and perhaps corrupted anyway because of bad network connections). Replayed packets are invalid. At that point the client's IP address no longer matters, since it's the only entity with the key. The server accepts valid packets from anywhere, and also sends packets to the IP address that most recently sent it a valid packet.

This should as much protection as an SSH connection over TCP. One thing I'd worry about is whether the server or client can be DoS'd with invalid packets. Is there anything else that seems concerning?

<comment><USER58> I guess I was thinking about something involving a principle similar to session fixation, but it was just a passing thought. Your methodologies seem sound.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, I think in order for session fixation to work, you have to have multiple connections trying to use the same session, and trick one of them into reattaching to the wrong session. For HTTP + cookies, that's doable. But the only concept of a "connection" in mosh is this key shared between client and server and only stored in RAM, and there's exactly one session per server process, and one client per server. A new connection is a new session (you have to use screen or something if you want to connect to an old terminal).

There are occasional requests for the ability to write out the client key and cryptographic state to disk, so you can reboot your machine, kill and restart a process on Android, etc. without losing your connection. But they've been pushing back because it breaks this straightforwardness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Don't use it. It's a bigger security risk than e.g. SSH because there is no audit and so well tested regarding security.

<comment><USER60> I think caution is good, but I am not sure "Don't use it" is a fair assessment for all use cases given Mosh's technology and track record over the years. Of course SSH is more battle tested but, Mosh has a FAQ entry just for this concern:

"In one concrete respect, the Mosh protocol is more secure than SSH's: SSH relies on unauthenticated TCP to carry the contents of the secure stream. That means that an attacker can end an SSH connection with a single phony "RST" segment. By contrast, Mosh applies its security at a different layer (authenticating every datagram), so an attacker cannot end a Mosh session unless the attacker can continuously prevent packets from reaching the other side. A transient attacker can cause only a transient user-visible outage; once the attacker goes away, Mosh will resume the session."

"However, in typical usage, Mosh relies on SSH to exchange keys at the beginning of a session, so Mosh will inherit the weaknesses of SSH—at least insofar as they affect the brief SSH session that is used to set up a long- running Mosh session."

Also see, "Q: What is Mosh's security track record so far?" here: [https://mosh.mit.edu/#faq](https://mosh.mit.edu/#faq)

<comment><USER61> Mosh requires OpenSSH to run so no matter what, using Mosh is _ALWAYS_ less safe than OpenSSH alone since all it does is add functionality on top.

Now, I wrote a 3DES-telnet tool back in 1996 and it has zero security vulnerability. That's 20 years. Safe as hell! Yeah exactly. Everyone uses OpenSSH. Very few use Mosh. Invalid comparison.

<comment><USER62> > Mosh requires OpenSSH to run so no matter what, using Mosh is ALWAYS less > safe than OpenSSH alone since all it does is add functionality on top.

Not sure I'd agree with this, since after initial session establishment, it completely replaces the functionality of OpenSSH in a way that guards against privilege escalation and authenticates every packet.

I do agree that there are some concerns with how 'battle tested' it is, but not sure I believe this about "audits" since, I mean, the entire world was using OpenSSL to build the entire internet for ages and we just found out it was one guy scraping through the bug tracker for far too long.

The model of mosh is more secure than SSH, though its' session resumption could potentially expose a hole if someone has your token and session keys, they can resume your session.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> autossh + tmux still. How are people getting around the lack of SSH agent forwarding?

<comment><USER20> I think "Not wanting to use SSH agent forwarding" is the answer. I don't want every single machine I use to be able to authenticate as me to anyone else. If I actually want to be able to connect to a third machine, I'll have an SSH key on the second machine. For instance, my phone has an SSH key to SSH/mosh to my VPS, and my VPS has a different SSH key that can authenticate to GitHub. If I suspect my VPS got compromised, I can kill its key on GitHub without having to worry about whether my single, master, local key got compromised. Given that ssh-keygen is so easy and basically every server I want to talk to supports multiple authorized_keys, I haven't seen much use for agent forwarding.

Also, mosh was developed at MIT, where there's a good Kerberos setup for most SSH-able machines. So if you really want forwarding, you can forward your Kerberos ticket with the initial SSH connection. The mosh-server command on Athena is actually a wrapper script that copies your Kerberos ticket (so it's not destroyed when the SSH session exits) and sets up a Kerberos + AFS session for the actual mosh-server to run inside:

[http://web.mit.edu/mosh_project/arch/amd64_deb60/bin/mosh- se...](http://web.mit.edu/mosh_project/arch/amd64_deb60/bin/mosh-server)

There's little use for key-based authentication on Athena, let alone agent forwarding, because if you _don 't_ forward Kerberos tickets, you don't have access to your network home directory.

<comment><USER64> > I don't want every single machine I use to be able to authenticate as me to > anyone else.

There is the `-c` option to `ssh-add` for that reason:

         -c      Indicates that added identities should be subject to confirmation
                 before being used for authentication.  Confirmation is performed
                 by ssh-askpass(1).  Successful confirmation is signaled by a zero
                 exit status from ssh-askpass(1), rather than text entered into
                 the requester.

<comment><USER32> Security by policy is worse than security by design. Mosh doesn't have code that implements agent forwarding, so there's no bugs in the policy code I have to be worried about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> This is amazing. I was very tired of SSH and something like this was really needed.

</comment><comment><USER66> Mobile shell but not mobile website...

</comment><comment><USER67> no openwrt package unfortunately.

<comment><USER68> I have packages for OpenWRT @ [https://laro.se/mosh-package-for- openwrt/](https://laro.se/mosh-package-for-openwrt/)

Not tested on trunk, works for me on CC 15.05.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> No windows support but I wonder if this can run in Ubuntu on Windows 10.

</comment><comment><USER70> >SSH waits for the server's reply before showing you your own typing. That can make for a lousy user interface. Mosh is different: it gives an instant response to typing, deleting, and line editing.

This seems asinine. If latency is an issue I want to know it, not be fooled into thinking my input is being interpreted correctly by 'predictions'. Does this mean when I hit 'jjjjjll' in vim, I'm going to see this underlined on- screen in mosh in high-latency situations?

<comment><USER71> Only if your recent keystrokes have been getting echoed, and if you haven't done something that might disrupt echo.

> Predictions are done in epochs: when the user does something that might > alter the echo behavior — like hit ESC or carriage return or an up- or down- > arrow — Mosh goes back into making background predictions until a prediction > from the new batch can be confirmed as correct.

<comment><USER70> Yeah, this offends me - I want my terminal to have simple, predictable behavior, not be trying to reason about what the shell process is up to. If it has some predictive model, I have to worry about my predictive model (expectation of what happens when I hit a key) being in conflict.

<comment><USER72> You really don't have to worry about that, imo. The predictive feature doesn't overlap connectivity issues long enough for you to ever wonder "Am i connected or not"?

Not to mention, it shows you in _two_ ways that you have connectivity issues.

1\. All echoing prints underlines, so you always know if it's predictive output or not. 2\. Any prolonged connectivity issue displays a blue bar at the top of the session, showing how long you've been disconnected for.

 __edit __: And of course, you can simply turn off predictive echo if it 's a feature you hate. but man oh man, is it something to love, imo.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scientists create first working electronic quantum processor - <AUTHOR> http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=115089&govDel=USNSF_51

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.gizmag.com/first-electronic-quantum- processor/121...](http://www.gizmag.com/first-electronic-quantum- processor/12125/picture/85186/)

[http://www.dailytech.com/Researchers+Claim+First+Real+Quantu...](http://www.dailytech.com/Researchers+Claim+First+Real+Quantum+Processor/article15544.htm)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics>

lol. fast computers. real fast.

</comment><comment><USER2> Does anyone have some good scientific links for what a quantum processor is? I am a bit familiar with quantum physics so the more in-depth the better.

All the stuff I read so far contains some magical descriptions by journalists who don't exactly know what they are talking about.

<comment><USER3> lectures by David Deutsch

<http://www.quiprocone.org/Protected/DD_lectures.htm>

<comment><USER2> Looking good so far. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>