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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

Wow. They literally just phished me. I was distracted while installing Zoom and didn't look too carefully.

I'm genuinely quite angry about this. I never enter passwords into 3rd party apps - I've had arguments with companies who embed oAuth flows into their app about this.

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If it’s any consolation, they didn’t get your password.

How so?

Excuse my ignorance here, then what is the purpose of the fake system dialog?

It's a real system dialog popped by the OS when the install script requests superuser privileges. It's not fake, and the password goes to the OS, not the script.

Why is it ungrammatical then? (serious question, i take that as a sign that it is not a real OS dialogue)

Because the text displayed in the dialog is specified by the caller.

So the tweet is mistaken? How do you know this?

You are the first person I've seen to know enough about the OSX APIs to know that it is real. I went back to look at the twitter thread and only saw (certainly could've overlooked) one person who was saying that it is real.

Thanks for clearing that up, though I must say they (Zoom) bring this upon themselves by having such a poorly worded dialog.

Maybe try to read the blog post https://objective-see.com/blog/blog_0x56.html instead of a Twitter thread. People trying to glean information from truncated 140-char messages (often written in the most attention-grabbing way possible) is one of the main reasons why Twitter is full of misinformation.

I've tried googling and didn't see any blog posts. 140 chars is certainly enough for someone to link that :). Anyway, thank you for making me and others aware of this blog.

The blog post is linked to in the article being discussed and honestly would be a better link.

From the HN guidelines: Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Maybe try to read the blog post" can be easily replaced with a less patronizing and just as informative "It's in this blog post".

You have good points to make, they don't need the vitriol to be taken.

I was responding to a comment that explicitly said they couldn’t find the information in the Twitter thread.

I was clearly also making a meta-comment about Twitter misinformation, so the patronizing part was inevitable.

Thanks for this link - I found it a much more technically interesting and insightful description than the TC article.

(The TechCrunch article also misinterprets parts of the blog post.)

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