{"id":951,"date":"2014-02-22T17:16:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-22T17:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/?p=951"},"modified":"2014-07-07T19:08:37","modified_gmt":"2014-07-07T19:08:37","slug":"if-youre-feeling-digitally-suicidal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/?p=951","title":{"rendered":"if you’re feeling (digitally) suicidal…."},"content":{"rendered":"

… here’s how to decrease the security of your mac….<\/p>\n

It was one of those situations that are hard to explain, but I wanted to execute an X program on a remote system and have it show up on my Mac’s screen WITHOUT using ssh. This was on Snow Leopard with the XQuartz X server, but probably similar in most macs.<\/p>\n

Back in the age of dinosaurs you could just do “xhost +” (for complete suicide) or “xhost +ip-addr-or-hostname” to allow specific hosts to connect to your system (when XQuartz is installed xhost and its friends are located in \/opt\/X11\/bin\/ by default.) Even if you do this, however, OS X by default doesn’t listen to the network; to really kill your security you have to modify \/opt\/X11\/bin\/startx – on mine it’s line 111 or so, you’ll see 3 lines:<\/p>\n

if<\/span> [<\/span> x`<\/span>defaults read<\/span> $X11_PREFS_DOMAIN<\/span> nolisten_tcp`<\/span> = x1 ]<\/span> ; then<\/span>
\ndefaultserverargs<\/span>="$defaultserverargs<\/span> -nolisten tcp"<\/span>
\nfi<\/span><\/div><\/div>\n

Kill the “-nolisten tcp” bit, so it looks like:<\/p>\n

if<\/span> [<\/span> x`<\/span>defaults read<\/span> $X11_PREFS_DOMAIN<\/span> nolisten_tcp`<\/span> = x1 ]<\/span> ; then<\/span>
\ndefaultserverargs<\/span>="$defaultserverargs<\/span>"<\/span>
\nfi<\/span><\/div><\/div>\n

(Alternately set the environ variable.)<\/p>\n

Change the file, restart the X server, and you’re good to go. Just turn this off when you’re done :)<\/p>\n

Just in case anyone else is feeling their security is too good, or need a hack like I did.<\/p>\n

(Using xhost is generally a bad idea, security-wise, but sometimes you just have to do what’s necessary to do the job.)<\/p>\n

It really is amazing how long X11 has been around – almost 30 years (thanks for the correction, I had 20 earlier!), as of this writing, with no end in sight.<\/p>\n

\"X<\/a>
http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/X_Window_System<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… here’s how to decrease the security of your mac…. It was one of those situations that are hard to explain, but I wanted to execute an X program on a remote system and have it show up on my Mac’s screen WITHOUT using ssh. This was on Snow Leopard with the XQuartz X server, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[88,32,4,6],"tags":[254,252,253,324,256,255],"class_list":["post-951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dinosaurs","category-mac","category-security","category-tech","tag-anti-secuity","tag-bad-bad-bad","tag-bad-dan","tag-mac","tag-x11","tag-xwindows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=951"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1025,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/951\/revisions\/1025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trouble.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}