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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Yes, it is. The only change being made is that WebKit home apps are being allowed. Since Apple couldn’t create the Home app frameworks for third party apps, they disabled all of them to comply with the new rules. This just means that, unless the EU says otherwise, Home Screen WebKit apps are still ok without needing to open to third-party engines. This is a non-story as that is already the currently released functionality and the change was only made because Apple was attempting to be conservative with its compliance.



  • It’s not that great of a solution, though. I dunno if anyone remembers but, when Gatekeeper (the interface to do this) first was added to MacOS, it was in response to a malware “virus scanner” that was out called MacKeeper. It was advertised as a malware scanner/Mac maintenance tool but it was just an ad platform that would inject all kinds of crap into your browser and run all kinds of keyloggers and things in the background.

    As soon as Gatekeeper was released, the MacKeeper website made a specific page that had step-by-step instructions for how to disable Gatekeeper and it would prompt you to visit the page if MacKeeper ever made it onto your system. If you ever re-enabled it, it would prompt you to disable again and show you the instructions.

    It’s an endless cat and mouse game. The only way this works is if they put it in as a multi-step terminal process. Novice users will not fuck with the terminal unless they know what they’re doing and are comfortable with the consequences.








  • This wasn’t a brute force attack, though. Even if they had brute force detection, which I’m not sure if they don’t or not, that would have done nothing to help this situation as nothing was brute forced in the way that would have been detected. The attempts were spread out over months using bots that were local to the last good login location. That’s the primary issue here. The logins looked legitimate. It wasn’t until after the exposure that they knew it wasn’t and that was because of other signals that 23andMe obviously had in place (I’m guessing usage patterns or automation detection).


  • I guess we just have different ideas of responsibility. It was 23andMe’s responsibility to offer MFA, and they did. It was the user’s responsibility to choose secure passwords and enable MFA and they didn’t. I would even play devil’s advocate and say that sharing your info with strangers was also the user’s responsibility but that 23andMe could have forced MFA on accounts who shared data with other accounts.

    Many people hate MFA systems. It’s up to each user to determine how securely they want to protect their data. The users in question clearly didn’t if they reused passwords and didn’t enable MFA when prompted.