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Comment by norberg | Hacker News Reader

We have a revised set of commands that fix the symlink more correctly. These can only be run from macOS Recovery Console:

  rm -rf /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle
  ln -shf /private/var /var
  chflags -h restricted /var
  chflags -h hidden /var
  xattr -sw com.apple.rootless "" /var

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> We have a revised set of commands that fix the symlink more correctly.

Tell your team and your supervisors this:

My computer is not your playground.

I’m sure most engineers on the team feel awful. They’re clearly trying, and maybe in a day or so we should figure out the nags ember breakdown. But for the time being, let’s let engineers do their job?

> I’m sure most engineers on the team feel awful.

There is no legitimate reason for a user-space install to manipulate system directories. So for an install to do so, there must have been an conscious decision made and code written to make real.

Therefore, for this system manipulation to have both been introduced and released, "most engineers on the team" either raised no problems with it or did not consider the implications of this decision.

> But for the time being, let’s let engineers do their job?

They did their job, which resulted in the release of this system destabilizing product.

Perhaps the job they should have done was to consider their work product be one which did not assume complete control of the machine onto which it runs?

Ok, but with newer macOS releases, SIP is enabled. I'm assuming the Google developers working on this are doing their developer work on newer SIP enabled releases....

No. They bear some responsibility for their abusive updating mechanism. They did bad and they should feel bad.

Users have no choice but to take whatever updates they throw at us, and have no recourse but to sit around and wait for another update to be pushed.

There is no way to roll updates back, and disabling updates is obfuscated and hidden away behind an obscure terminal command that nobody would discover on their own.

Google invited themselves into the guts of our computer on the pretense of updating their browser, and then they made a mess.

If Google explicitly laid out what they were doing and asked permission, many users would not grant it, which is why they are so covert about it. It isn't that it is being unobtrusive, it is that it is hiding.

I swear, only Google can get away with this. Nobody was this defensive when Microsoft pushed Windows 10 on people.

Is there a cohort of malware developers in Mountain View who hate their jobs but have no other opportunity for employment? I kinda doubt it.

These devs know what they are doing and in the current economic environment are clearly happy to be doing it.

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