Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jyaif | Hacker News Reader

The remote wipe part is extremely scary. How do you disable this on your mac?

System Preferences - iCloud - Find My Mac (remove the checkmark)

Is there any way to remove the wiping bit without removing the whole finding functionality? That bit is extremely useful, and if a hacker managed to get into my iCloud I wouldn't be that worried about them being able to locate it. But being able to wipe everything as well is a different matter.

IIRC it does the wipe via the recovery boot, so wiping that partition would kill it.

BUT: you'd be hosed if you ever needed recovery, you wouldn't be able to use full-disk encryption, and there's likely other bits of the OS that would break in subtle and interesting ways without it there. Tread _very_ carefully.

As long as you have a recovery USB, you'll be fine.

>IIRC it does the wipe via the recovery boot, so wiping that partition would kill it.

Isn't this not an option in relatively recent Macs, which have the recovery functionality baked into the EFI firmware and not as a partition on the disk?

Newer Macs have that functionality out of the box, and a bunch from 2010 and early 2011 that did not originally ship with the recovery firmware ended up getting it later via update: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4904

That's 'Internet Recovery', which is just enough to fire up WLAN and grab a recovery image to netboot from in the event your disk is totally unreadable. Unlikely it'd still be able to trigger a wipe this way. Recovery itself is still it's own partition (from my mid-2011 Air):

    apaulin:~/ $ diskutil list                                                                                                                                                                       [13:38:41]

    /dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            120.5 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

You need to disable 'Find my Mac' under iCloud's settings: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2697

Reply on news.ycombinator.com