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Apple has introduced a new security feature in Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11) called System Integrity Protection (sometimes referred to as rootless). What is System Integrity Protection? According to Apple’s documentation: A new security policy that applies to every running process, including privileged code and code that runs out of the sandbox. The policy extends additional protections to components on disk and at run-time, only allowing system binaries to be modified by the system installer and software updates. Code injection and runtime attachments to system binaries are no longer permitted. ...

If you have not heard, the phenomenal cloud base SaaS password manager, LastPass has agreed to be acquired be the not so customer friendly LogMeIn. The IT world immediately panned the anti-idea as anti-consumer and the security world agreed and raised all sorts of red flags as well. People dislike LogMeIn for a variety of reasons but the main one is that they pulled the rugs out from under a lot of folks who were using LogMeIn to help administer remote computers (I was one of these people). LogMeIn rapidly increased pricing on their services making their product go from consumer to “prosumer” to full blown enterprise pricing very quickly. Some people didn’t have time to get something else installed on the systems they were administering with LogMeIn before their service was cut. ...

I had some Apple Keychain issues after upgrading to Mac OS X El Capitan yesterday. Apple provided a reasonable resolution (blow away the login Apple Keychain and re-create it). As it turns out, my issues weren’t limited to just the El Capitan upgrade. The Juniper Networks’ VPN client, Junos Pulse, has some pretty awful issues. The behavior went something like this: Save a password for a VPN connection in Junos Pulse VPN client The first use of the VPN connection will be fine Disconnect VPN connection Close Junos Pulse VPN client Open VPN client Attempt to connect to recently created VPN (with saved password) All hell breaks loose; Apple Keychain issues galore. Literally every Apple Keychain becomes unusable to some extent and a reboot is required to resolve the issue. ...

I was reading through Wired magazine and saw a Windows 10 ad. If you’ve turned on a TV the past month you’ve seen the ad I’m referring to, this is just the print edition of the TV ad. She won’t have to remember passwords. Or obsess about security. To her, every screen is meant to be touched. And so on… (here’s the full ad if you really want to see it). But, there is one big thing wrong with this marketing approach and Microsoft actually says it right on the ad: ...

I was fixing MySQL replication on a slave this past week. Everything seemed to be ready to go after bringing data over from the master manually. I went to connect the slave to the master and nothing happened. Whaaaaaa? 1 2 Last_IO_Errno: 1045 Last_IO_Error: error connecting to master 'repl@blah.local:3306' - retry-time: 60 retries: 86400 Let me look up MySQL error code 1045: 1 2 Error: 1045 SQLSTATE: 28000 (ER_ACCESS_DENIED_ERROR) Message: Access denied for user '%s'@'%s' (using password: %s) That’s not helpful. After some additional testing I realized the password might be too long. Sure enough, the CHANGE MASTER TO syntax guide states MASTER_PASSWORD has a maximum length of 32 characters (despite the MySQL client having a longer limit). ...