Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2019-05-17

This Monday, macOS 10.14.5 (and all the related updates) dropped. The timing was surprising, but became clearer when the news on a new group of Intel CPU vulnerabilities arrived as well.

10.14.5 brings some mitigations to these vulnerabilites, but to be sure, you would have to disable Hyperthreading on your CPU(s) which brings up to 40% performance hit.

With 10.14.5 the new notarization rules for applications and kernel extensions arrive as well. All of this is once again demonstrating the importance (and the challenges) of IT being able to quickly roll-out and support system updates.

There are still a few spots left for the “Introduction to Scripting macOS” class on May 27/28!

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On Scripting OS X

News and Opinion

Apple Updates

Articles

Tweets

  • mikeymikey: “macOS Mojave 10.14.5 (18F132)… ”
  • Jason Broccardo on Twitter: “#macadmins n.b. the both the 10.14.5 and iTunes Device Support Update updates have trailing spaces when you are looking at the CLI softwareupdate listing. If you want to CLI install you’ll need to account for that.”
  • Marnin: “When using the Time Server payload on earlier version of macOS 10.14, the time zone was not getting set properly.”
  • Ken Case: “Today Apple released macOS Mojave 10.14.5, which fixes a CoreAnimation drawing issue that was affecting customers using large OmniOutliner and OmniPlan documents. If you’re a Mac customer using Mojave, I strongly recommend updating!”

MDS/Zombieload

MacAdmins on Twitter

  • Caleb Coy: “Was just reminded that the #macadmins Slack community turns 4 this weekend. I don’t know about y’all, but a lot has happened for me in that time and having this community has helped so much.”
  • Daniel Jalkut: “Heads up Mac developers: the ”codesign –preserve-entitlements=runtime“ parameter does not actually preserve the runtime flag. Radar #50697511.”
  • Timo Perfitt: “Interesting that the additional recovery partition key combos are only available if you have installed 10.12.4 or later at least once.”
  • Adam Codega: “A configuration profile is never late. Nor is it early; it arrives precisely when it means to.”
  • Kitzy: “macOS Mojave 10.14.5 has been out for over 48 hours now. Still no sign of it in Jamf’s patch management. It’s frustrating that Jamf finally got the mechanics of patch management down but crippled it by making us all rely on Jamf for patch definitions that are slow to update.”
  • Ricky Mondello: “Did you know that you can drag Safari’s Downloads popover by its title into being a detached, free-standing window, so you can more easily monitor your long-running downloads?”

Bugs and Security

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Updates and Releases

To Listen

Just for Fun

Support

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Published by

ab

Mac Admin, Consultant, and Author