I would pay for this.

How much?

I’ll bite: how about $10 per year, less than what I’d pay for a VPN service, but more than “free” which is what I pay to run a pi-hole like service for my local LAN only. If I were in charge of one of these existing VPN services I’d offer ad blocking as an upgrade.

The service is literally a VPN with an extra ad blocking service. Why would you pay less for that?

Depends on whether the VPN service also came with the same privacy assurances that the more costly competing VPN services offer.

How does a third party VPN that intercepts all of your data have any privacy assurance?

Well, an unlimited bandwidth vps should run less than $100/year, so a dozen users and you make a profit.

Who's in?

5 maybe 10 USD a month

One day all of us have to do stuff like this to keep up.

Can some AI do it for me?

Columbia University is doing a study on it: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03336398

You can turn on write to Siri in the options

Similar to https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/

I wish that was available for Android/PC/Linux.

"It only works after getting physical access once" - quote form somewhere else in the thread

...or if you enabled root for some reason, but didn't set a password.

You can just type root in the login window to get System administrator access.

Can this be used remotely? Edit: Yes, after turning on Remote Management on my second mac I was able to log into it using Remote Desktop, account root and no pw. It only works after getting physical access once.

Yes, I just had a coworker test it after I enabled remote management and they used screensharing.app. I didn't even get notified a user remoted in.. never used screen share, that seems awful. Had to look over and ask if he was in.

edit: I should say, I did test this locally first so I don't know if a fresh machine that hasn't done it will do the same thing and let a remote account enable root.. Would like to hear if anyone tested it remotely WITHOUT doing it locally first.

You can get undetectble remote access on most machines given "physical access once", so I don't think this qualifies as "remotely exploitable".

If root was ever enabled without setting a password, the machine is then in a state that it can be remotely exploitable.

While it's unlikely, there are probably plenty of users who have done this for some reason or another.

Don't underestimate a user's ability to blindly do things like this by following arcane instructions in attempts to fix an unrelated problem.

Not according to this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpOH0lxEGBE

They seem to be remotely accessing the machine to both set and then use the root account.

The system needs to have some sort of remote access, like screen sharing, turned on first, then you can remotely use the root account.

It only works after getting physical access once to enable the root user by gibing any password UI the root user with no password (which will enable the local root account, which is also why it fails the first time around)

I tested this by logging in as root at a preference pane then attempting to connect via ssh and screen sharing (both enabled) using root with no password. It did not work.

Not sure if you'd get different results after logging in as root at the login screen...

Been wondering that myself since it seems that this also happens with the login screen.

Here is the conversation I had https://pastebin.com/yYAjvTbW