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macOS 26.6.1

Juli Clover (release notes, security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer, IPSW):

macOS Tahoe 26.6.1 fixes a vulnerability that could allow an attacker to authenticate to Screen Sharing without valid credentials.

See also: Adam Engst and Mr. Macintosh.

Previously:

Update (2026-08-14): Bill Toulas:

In an update to the initial advisory, the Dutch agency said it received a report indicating that the vulnerability is being exploited in the wild in attacks where port 5900 is exposed to the internet.

According to the NCSC, the attacker obtained root access to the system and deployed a Monero cryptocurrency miner.

Update (2026-08-20): Edovia (tweet, MacRumors):

The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2026-65400, could allow an attacker on the network to authenticate to Screen Sharing without valid credentials. Reports now indicate that the vulnerability has been actively exploited on Macs where Screen Sharing was accessible from the Internet.

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[We] strongly recommend that all Screens users install the latest macOS updates as soon as possible.

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For users who want to further restrict access to Screen Sharing, Screens can connect to a Mac through an SSH tunnel instead of exposing the Screen Sharing service directly.

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Illinois Photos.app People Album Lawsuit

Anurag Chawake:

Apple faces a $32.5 billion lawsuit over how its Photos app scans and stores faces. A federal judge cleared the case to proceed as a class action late last month, allowing millions of Illinois iPhone owners to join.

The case has been years in the making, and Apple has fought to shut it down at nearly every turn. Now it heads back to the court, with the company’s privacy practices on trial.

[…]

Court records have shown that the update applies to users with iCloud Photos turned on. Those accounts also need to use at least 10GB of storage and contain at least 5,000 photos and videos. Plaintiffs say all this amounts to collecting biometric data without consent, putting Apple squarely at odds with Illinois law.

Again, I find it odd that features are apparently gated based on the capacity of your iCloud account rather than the available storage.

Malcolm Owen:

The lawsuit accuses Apple of collecting biometric data without user consent in the Photos app, reports The Times. It is alleged that Photos uses facial recognition technology to scan individuals who appear in images, creating a “faceprint” for each person in the photo library.

After collecting enough samples, an algorithm is allegedly used to identify the iPhone user. That data is then stored on the iPhone within the Photos app.

I don’t see what the issue is here. My understanding is that it only uploads vectors after you’ve opted in by enabling iCloud Photos and manually assigning names. Also, the vectors don’t seem like the sort of biometric information that the law was meant to protect.

Brian Webster:

Assuming things are working properly, what should happen is that the people you have specifically named and the photos you have specifically verified sync their info via iCloud. However, the actual face detection for the rest of the photos is done on a per device basis and is not synced via iCloud, primarily for security/privacy reasons.

So, when you first set up a new device, it will pull down the names and info for the photos where you have identified a particular person, but then it still needs to go through the entire library on-device, identify the faces in each photo, and compare them to the synced information to tell which person is in which photo. So once it’s done, you should end up with mostly the same photos identified as each person, but each device still needs to do its own face detection locally.

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Confidential Apple Files in iCloud

Juli Clover:

The way Apple combines work and personal iCloud accounts left some employees able to access confidential documents after departing the company, reports The Information. The site spoke to more than half a dozen former Apple employees who were unknowingly left with access to sensitive content.

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Apple told The Information that the OpenAI lawsuit is unrelated to any files left available on iCloud and that it does not pursue legal claims against former employees who accidentally have Apple documents in their personal iCloud accounts.

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In a now-settled legal dispute, chip company Rivos claimed Apple intentionally lets former employees retain access to files “as part of a planned effort to generate a pretextual basis to sue the employees and their new employer for ‘stealing’ Apple material.” In the Rivos case, an employee was targeted for keeping work files in his personal iCloud account.

Andrew Orr:

The documents included confidential material such as plans for product launch events. The former employees said they made no effort to retain access and unexpectedly found the files mixed with their personal iCloud data.

The problem reportedly grew from Apple’s practice of encouraging employees to connect their personal Apple IDs to company-funded iCloud storage.

[…]

Apple also relied heavily on iMessage for workplace conversations and file sharing before rolling out Slack around 2019. Former employees could retain old iMessage conversations and attachments, while Apple could terminate their Slack access when they left.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

If you use your personal Apple ID, you get a magic “Apple Work” folder in iCloud Drive. When you leave Apple, that “Apple Work” folder disappears. But any other files or folders that were shared with you that were outside that magic folder are still in your iCloud Drive, because it’s still your personal iCloud account.

[…]

You still have the same Apple ID account, even though you no longer have an employee @apple.com email account. Overall, this is a humane way of dealing with digital identity. Your Apple ID account is you, the person, not “example@icloud.com”, one specific unique email address. And you, the person, may well have multiple email addresses — all of which can be associated with your one Apple ID account. That makes Apple IDs more nuanced and complicated than a simple mapping of one email address = one account. And it obviously makes access restrictions more complicated.

Yesterday, OpenAI released messages to show that Apple employees (with permission) retained access to the departing employee’s personal iCloud account so that they could access work files that were stored there. It’s just a mess that both the software and corporate policy encourage mixing everything in one account.

Eric Schwarz:

As many things I know about Apple, this whole thing both makes perfect sense and feels absolutely bonkers.

Previously:

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NSPasteboard Crashes When Handling File Promises

Wade Tregaskis:

NSPasteboard mutates itself simultaneously from the main thread and the global concurrent Dispatch pool, w.r.t. to its internal type cache. This is surprisingly trivial to reproduce (sample code below) by just dropping, e.g. a file promise (such as by opening a PNG in Preview, revealing the thumbnails sidebar, and then dragging the thumbnail onto the sample project’s window).

[…]

Since this bug causes semi-random memory corruption, it manifests in a large number of ways – not all of which are all that helpful.

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SwiftUI’s onDrop(of:isTargeted:perform:) method makes no claims or promises as to what thread / queue it executes the closure on, and in fact according to the anonymous Apple engineer it never executes the closure on the main thread.

Now, while that may be the intent, the reality of that is wrong – in my experience it always executes the closure on the main thread (which makes a lot of sense to me as drag-and-drop event handling in AppKit has always been on the main thread in practice).

Apple also told him that NSPasteboard is not safe to use outside the main thread, even though that’s not documented, it’s not @MainActor, and Apple’s own code does do that.

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