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Comment by blackRust | Hacker News Reader

If you look into the OS version analytics, there are 397 events registered from "macOS (10.14)". That's the next version of macOS :)

https://brew.sh/analytics/os-version/

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Perhaps someone deliberately messing with their version string, e.g. testing the software to make sure it handles "unknown" or "future" release cases properly?

nice catch!

My immediate thought is that this is spoofed. I doubt anyone at Apple would be silly enough to allow software on an unannounced OS to freely send out analytic data. I expect they'd have some sort of filtering applied either right on their dev/test machines (something like Little Snitch, though surely built in-house) or at the network level.

> I doubt anyone at Apple would be silly enough to allow software on an unannounced OS to freely send out analytic data

...and you'd be wrong. It is very common for Apple to test its new browser versions on the public internet and for those version numbers to show up in the logs of popular Apple web sites. It's one of the ways that Think Secret could confirm that a new version was on the way.

Besides, what does a version number reveal? “Oh, Apple is working on a new OS version!” You don’t say??

Certainly not much if anything at all, but it's mildly interesting to note that it identifies as 10.14 and not, say, 11.0.

Anyways there is surely something strange brewing for the next macOS, as Apple has repeatedly noted that "macOS High Sierra will be the last macOS release to support 32-bit apps without compromise", without specifying what kind of "compromise" might come up (see https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=06282017a )

I think you might be reading that wrong - should be "Without compromise, macOS will discontinue support for 32-bit apps". The only compromise should be not upgrading to 10.14 and staying on 10.13.

Maybe. It's an odd phrasing. Why not just say "will not run"? How do you run 32bit apps "WITH compromise"? In a VM window?

Think Secret? Wow, that takes me back.

I also doubt they’d ever release a security vulnerability where a user can enter a blank password to gain root access to macOS.

:-P

Why would they not allow internal software send out analytics data? At this point it is common knowledge that Apple is working on a new version of OS X that will come out next year.

It's incredibly weird since Apple employees are heavily discouraged from running Homebrew.

Why are they discouraged to run Homebrew?

Security no doubt.

Homebrew security is good enough for you and me but not good enough if you're working on Apple software.

> but not good enough if you're working on Apple software

Why not?

You’ve never worked at a big company like Apple or Facebook have you ?

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