Archive for October 21, 2022

Friday, October 21, 2022

Carbon Copy Cloner 6.1.3

Mike Bombich:

We’ve been testing the new OS over the summer, and I’m pleased to report that CCC is ready to protect your data before and after you apply this upgrade – we added official Ventura support to CCC 6.1.3, which we posted back in September.

[…]

They finally dropped the padlock paradigm, so pre-authentication is no longer required to unlock the settings in the Privacy panel. As a result, the procedure for granting Full Disk access to CCC and its helper tool on Ventura is now one step! When you start dragging CCC’s “privacy fish”, CCC will open the System Settings application and reveal the Full Disk Access controls, ready for the drop. At that point you’re prompted to authenticate, and then you’re done.

[…]

In Ventura, Apple deprecated an older mechanism for adding login items, and replaced it with a new mechanism. Normally I don’t immediately adopt brand-new features like this (because it makes it more complicated to support multiple OSes with one version of CCC), but we found that if we continued to use the old mechanism, the user would get frequent notifications that CCC had added a login item.

Previously:

SuperDuper 3.7 Beta 1

Dave Nanian:

[Until] those problems are fixed by Apple, you won’t be able to boot from a backup.

[…]

That said, your Smart Updates are going to work fine, and remain fully restorable. As explained previously, you need only reinstall the OS and point at the backup when prompted to restore during first boot.

I want to highlight this because I missed it the first time. Starting with Big Sur, clones—even lacking the system volume—can be restored by the macOS installer. Previously, this was only possible for Time Machine backups.

In the meantime, we’ve been improving SuperDuper. We’ve worked around some issues with Google Drive (which was incorrectly protecting folders on drives it’s not operating on), significantly improved some corner-cases in Smart Update, and made changes needed to work well under Ventura.

Previously:

Update (2022-10-27): It’s out of beta.

iOS 16.1: Per-App Copy-and-Paste Permissions

Joe Rossignol:

Apple has continued to refine the copy-and-paste feature in the weeks since. In the Settings app on the fourth beta of iOS 16.1 and later, a new “Paste from Other Apps” menu appears for apps that have previously asked for permission to paste content from another app. The menu can be found in the Settings app → [App Name] → Paste from Other Apps.

The menu presents users with three options:

  • Ask: The app must continue to request permission to paste content from other apps.
  • Deny: The app cannot paste content from other apps.
  • Allow: The app can paste content from other apps without asking for permission again.

Previously:

Google Ads’ Dark Money

Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin:

Why are there so many mystery accounts on Google’s Ad Network? Because Google has a long-standing practice of letting publishers monetize their websites without revealing their identity to advertisers. And there are a lot of people out there who want to anonymously collect free money from the biggest ATM in the world.

[…]

But not all sellers are like Condé Nast, which maintains a small family of websites. Some Sellers are ad exchanges themselves, with massive publisher networks of their own. For example, Amazon maintains Seller accounts with Google. This allows Amazon to plug its own massive network of publishers into Google’s ad network.

[…]

Once upon a time, even Google agreed this was sketchy. In 2017, Google and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) invented a new standard designed to help advertisers track their transactions.

[…]

The only tool Google gives advertisers today to manage these incredibly significant liabilities is... blocklists (or exclusion lists). But blocklists only enable you to block domains — not seller accounts. And the bad guys learned how to evade domain blocklists a long time ago.

Via Nick Heer:

Advertisers should clearly be allowed to say who they want to sell ads to, not just which domains they appear on. And, as Jammi and Atkin report, there are resellers and exchanges all down the chain. All of them should be compliant as well to be permitted to be a part of Google’s ad network.