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I feel like there are better ways to do this, to the point that this 'feature' actually looks really out-of-place. Why wouldn't you get these thumbnail previews when you actually scan the QR Code? You're going to be fetching/caching the favicon and framebuffer for the page anyways, there's literally no reason not to get that data at runtime rather than 3 hours later.

It's not exactly malicious, but weird "we know better than you" behavior like this ultimately drove me away from MacOS as a daily-driver.

> Why wouldn't you get these thumbnail previews when you actually scan the QR Code?

These aren't scanned, they're located inside .png image files you can download or generate locally on your computer.

> You're going to be fetching/caching the favicon and framebuffer for the page anyways, there's literally no reason not to get that data at runtime rather than 3 hours later.

No one asked the OS to fetch the favicon/framebuffer. Also, I would prefer the favicon of an image containing a QR code to be a thumbnail of the QR code, not the page it points to. I expect this delay is not a nefarious Little Snitch bypassing tool but a search cache update process that only runs when the computer is very idle. Better to run background tasks lazily than every time you commit an image that might contain a QR code to the filesystem.

That's definitely a more sane analysis of the situation, thank you for your two cents.

In general, these things frustrate me just as much as they did on Windows. I don't want random processes jumping up to use 100% of my CPU for no reason. I can't even count the number of times my Mac gets pinned by mdworker processes running in the background. It's reminiscent of pulling my hair out trying to understand why OneDrive or Edge is pinning one of my cores even though it isn't open.

My overall gripe is this pattern of behavior. I'd rather spend 2-5 seconds waiting for my QR code to load instead of my OS deciding to randomly cache it at some indeterminate point. Maybe other people disagree, though. Us HN users don't really tend to reflect the opinions of Joe Shmoe and his feelings towards modern computing.

mdworker runs at background priority though, anything else using the CPU should preempt it.

That's a very comforting thought for when my Mac is idling at 80c and I have to join a video conference.

There is absolutely nothing malicious that has been shown.

Scanning your images and followong links in them without user consent is pretty malicious.

How is it malicious? “Malicious” doesn’t mean “unwanted behaviour”. You are saying that Apple intend to do harm with this. How?

On the one hand, I get where you're coming from and I agree that this specific example isn't malicious (as I've highlighted elsewhere in the thread)

...on the other hand, this is the exact same technology Apple lets China use to hunt down their religious and political minorities. Maybe they don't intend harm to Americans, but one thing is for certain; Apple doesn't treat privacy as a human right. If you can live with that, then more power to you.

> this is the exact same technology Apple lets China use to hunt down their religious and political minorities.

QR codes? HTTP requests? I’m not sure what technology you’re referring to.

> one thing is for certain; Apple doesn't treat privacy as a human right.

They have put a huge amount of effort into privacy technology; more than any comparable company I can think of. I don’t think your certainty is even remotely justified.

Seems a bit like a witch hunt to me. It's your PC executing the request. Nowhere does it say this data gets send to apple servers.

What are you talking about? It sounds like you don’t understand what is going on here. Perhaps you think some data is going to Apple?

Having read the article I entirely understand what is going on here.

Do you expect your images to be scanned on disk and the links in them to be opened, leaking your ip? What if you do something as simple as screenshot an address bar in a browser? Save a menu QR code?

Now you are sending out traffic, accidentally, with your full ip to random places due to a service Apple inserted that you have no knowledge of.

I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is being done via Apple's private relay. If so, your IP address is not being leaked to anyone.

The thread says she got an information that somebody requested the URL and it was her own IP address. So no private relay here.

Do you seriously believe that your IP is private?

Do you know every site that has received your ip address?

I think the honest answer to both of these questions has to be no.

http://letstrack.you/?id=grooot

Throw that to disk for me so I can map where you are, where you go, when your machine is up and how often your search indexing runs.

I think the idea is that it is a way for your IP address to leak without a user-initiated request.

I could send you a QR code that I've setup specifically to get your IP address.

If you have the misfortune of living in a country where accessing $BANNED_WEBSITE can get you a nighttime visit from the local goon squad, this could well get you tortured or killed.

There have been reported cases of using qr codes for phishing/malware distribution. Previously they still required users to actually use a qr code scanner, now I need to simply glue some qr code at a famous tourist photo spot and bang lots of people accessing the site (does the indexer execute js?).

I agree. The problem is that it's rather annoying, and there are many such behaviors on MacOS (many of which you can't disable). Stuff like this is another good example of esoteric, almost curious behavior taking place without any input or prompt from the user. It's really absurd stuff.

>It's not so different from when you text someone a URL in Messages, it automatically shows a title and thumbnail to both parties.

And that's how the pegasus/etc. pwned iPhones

It was before the zero day was closed.

so you are saying apple is doing something they already knew is a bad idea?

No. I’m saying your information is outdated and wrong.

What do you mean? The OP said that this is how Pegasus pwned (notice the past tense) the iPhone. That's correct. Moreover while Apple might have closed that specific vulnerability, would you bet your money (or even your live) on there not being other vulnerabilities in the apple indexer?

how can you be so confident that it's "closed"? the last time apple announced the high protection mode for state sponsored targets in new ios (whatever it's called), they disable all auto previews in that mode. if they are as confident as you are that it's "closed" that doesn't seem necessary?

Disabling link previews in high protection mode is more likely to be a combination of not issuing any network requests that could accidentally leak your IP, and being able to see the full URL so link previews can't pretend to be a different site to trick you into clicking on it.

I’m confident that it’s closed because they claimed to have closed it.

As for the high protection mode - of course that reduces the attack surface.

If this forum were to live up to its name, you would be laughed out of here after that comment.

OP reached a similar conclusion farther down in the Twitter thread:

facebookexternalhit/1.1 Facebot Twitterbot/1.0

What.

"This is the iMessages app's crawler [...] Apple has chosen to use this useragent in their iMessages app to ensure the unfurling of the URL and the rich preview works more often than not."²

² https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/138992

Automatic link following is pretty bad, nefarious or not. Intent is kinda beside the point of issue here; it's not like we're trying to sue Apple...

Or maybe we should group up a massive list of poor decisions into a formal complaint?

Regardless, theis shouldn't happen. Indexing the URL, fine. Fetching it is a very poor idea and a can of worms.

> which is probably either generating thumbnail previews (for Finder) or indexing (for Spotlight)

Neither of which require, nor to be honest even makes any sense to, go to the URL that the QR code represents.