
Mysterious Avid Issue Knocks Out Mac Pro Workstations Across Hollywood - lnguyen
https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/avid-mac-pro-corrupted-hollywood-1203347033/
======
foxhill
yikes. having written aax plugins for a while, i have to say, i’m kind of
surprised this came from AVID. from what it sounds like (having scraped the
surface), it’s not their editing software (Pro Tools, et al.) but their copy
protection management tool/device driver - iLok.

i’m sure there are some very anxious engineers in the AVID offices today.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
> their copy protection management tool/device driver - iLok.

They're still using that? These things were successfully cracked in the
nineties, I was convinced nobody uses hardware dongles anymore.

~~~
RealDinosaur
Oh, it's not just Avid. Some audio production software such as ReFX Nexus
still uses a USB dongle. There is no way to use the software without it
plugged in.

It also has a policy where if you damage the dongle, you have to buy again and
get a 10% discount off the FULL price of the VST.

In the age of people gigging on laptops, I'm not entirely sure how they think
they are gonna sell any more of them. I fancy it myself as it has quite a few
'familiar' sounds on it, but not with all the downsides.

~~~
episodeiv
To add to that, it's not just media production.

In the medical field, almost all software for performing and analyzing EKGs,
X-rays, MRIs etc. comes by default with some sort of dongle-based protection.
Apparently, it's not enough that you need the biggest dongle in the world
(i.e. the machine itself!) to use the software. Some vendors do offer
alternatives if you fight them hard enough but the default still is a trip to
dongle town.

~~~
tecleandor
Ah, but they need to control that CD recording device on the workstation, just
in case you're handing out CDs to your patients WITHOUT A CD RECORDING
LICENSE. They have the weirdest licenses.

~~~
stallmanite
So there is software on a medical device concerned with users copying a Billy
Joel CD?

~~~
tecleandor
They sell every functionality as an aditional "license" or "plugin".

So, for example, it's not unusual that, by default, your half a million USD
scanner, that includes a powerful workstation to control it (the one the
technician uses behind the window) will only let you write CDs (for example,
to give your patient a copy of his/her scan) if you pay an additional "CD
Writing license"

Now, with PACS and centralization that have changed a bit, but still...

~~~
stallmanite
Thanks for the explanation. Still gross but not as bad as RIAA checks being
performed somehow.

------
blobs
This is what Avid sends you after creating an account:

Your iLok account allows you to:

    
    
      - Use the free iLok License Manager application to manage your licenses
      - Take advantage of Zero Downtime and Theft & Loss Coverage premium services to help protect your investment
    
    

_Take advantage of Zero Downtime_ I never understand what they mean with this,
but now it definitely lost all its meaning.

~~~
franky47
Zero Downtime is a paying option provided by PACE (makers of the iLok and the
copy protection software) for extended support if one loses their licenses. It
covers a broken/lost/stolen iLok, not sure how it would fit in this case.

A few years back I was working for a company that used iLok protection and had
a major outage like this, we nicknamed it the iLokalypse.

~~~
devm0de
From what I recall zero downtime simply meant if a ilok went missing then PACE
would assist you in replacing license(s) to a replacement ilok from their end.
Trouble is often times you couldn’t quickly find a replacement ilok without a
guitar center nearby and would still have to order it through avid store and
wait for it to arrive if you didn’t plan for this.

------
KaiserPro
rule 1 of hollywood tech support:

Always take what the editor says with a massive pinch of salt.

I spent ten years in the movie industry, and the people that were the most
forthright, and almost universally wrong about technical things were editors.

"The monitor is out of grade" No, you've set the background lights to red.

"The sound is out of sync" No, you've turned off the amp and somehow managed
to get the crappy test tv to play sound

"the hardrive is corrupt" no, its clearly asking you to update OSX

my personal favorite:

"my station is slow" No, what you appear to be doing is copying 135 TBs of
data from one share to another.

~~~
nkozyra
What you're describing sounds like industry-specific anecdotes from a very
common, cross-industry reality about non technical users.

~~~
jon-wood
I'd revise that to the far more irritating segment of users who think they're
more technical than they really are. Actual non technical users are fine,
because they generally know when they don't understand a thing. The thinks-
their-technical users will bravely throw in whatever phrases they've heard
mentioned in relation to a completely unrelated problem.

~~~
fortran77
I don't understand this.

> The thinks-their-technical users

English was not my first language and sometimes I get tripped up. What does
this mean?

~~~
kiddico
They meant "thinks-they're-technical", which might clear things up.

Putting dashes between a bunch of words isn't really a correct way to do this,
but it's a way to smash a bunch of words together and pretend it's one word.
In this case an adjective describing the users.

~~~
cgriswald
It's perfectly cromulent to hyphenate words this way. Doing so causes them to
become adjectives. For instance, you would say "fast-paced agenda," not "fast
paced agenda," or "fast, paced agenda." The latter two have a different—and in
this example, weird—meaning.

In this case, I think it's a poor style choice, because there are two verbs
and an adjective being combined, but there's nothing 'incorrect' about doing
so. It might be clearer to say "users who think they are technical," but
fixing the mixed pluralization and incorrect use of "their" would go a long
way on their own.

~~~
vokep
What you did there, it has been seen. :)

------
ratww
Someone on Reddit posted some more details.

Apparently it's iLok removing the /var directory.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/d8nxhk/mysterious_av...](https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/d8nxhk/mysterious_avid_issue_knocks_out_mac_pro/f1bnun2/)

~~~
theclaw
It now looks as though it might be Google Chrome. Whoooops.

[https://mrmacintosh.com/google-chrome-keystone-is-
modifying-...](https://mrmacintosh.com/google-chrome-keystone-is-modifying-
var-symlink-on-non-sip-macs-causing-boot-issues/)

e: hn discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21064663](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21064663)

~~~
holy_city
I can't wait for the post mortem, I wasn't expecting anything with Avid/PACE
but if it's Google's problem then maybe we'll get info.

I work in this space (and am a casual user in the space) and I really want to
know why /private/var was getting unlinked through a normal update and why
Avid got pinged for it.

~~~
ratww
> why Avid got pinged for it

I think that was just because it was Avid users discovered it on the FB
group[1].

I thought it was cool of their CEO to talk to the community, despite no
evidence of it being their fault.

[1]
[https://www.facebook.com/groups/mediacomposer/permalink/1015...](https://www.facebook.com/groups/mediacomposer/permalink/10158340050634460/)

------
theclaw
Sounds unlikely to be a virus. Certificate expiry seems probable if it’s
happened suddenly to everyone using this software and dongle.

~~~
comex
Whatever it is, it's changing operating system settings, so not just
certificate expiry:

[https://twitter.com/MarcusPun/status/1176369954255331328/pho...](https://twitter.com/MarcusPun/status/1176369954255331328/photo/1)

~~~
djsumdog
huh .. to the point of changing what groups a user is in (or corrupting the
local user info).

------
batmanthehorse
This site says Chrome Updater is the cause of the problem:
[https://mrmacintosh.com/google-chrome-keystone-is-
modifying-...](https://mrmacintosh.com/google-chrome-keystone-is-modifying-
var-symlink-on-non-sip-macs-causing-boot-issues/)

It only happens on Macs with SIP disabled, which includes a lot of Mac Pros
with Avid (for third-party video card support)

------
archi42
Sound like someone messed up a removal routine, equivalent to "rm
$base_dir/$temp_dir -rf".

~~~
693471
Not possible with SIP. The OS files are read only. Not even root can change
them.

~~~
fredoralive
Someone else in thread mentions an kext for the iLok dongle AVID uses, so are
kexts covered by SIP? Or are they counted as part of the kernel, and thus all
powerful?

~~~
693471
Looks like some situations AVID requires SIP disabled for external video
cards?

So dumb. Why do companies pull this crap instead of fixing their issues with
the vendor instead of leaving their users vulnerable

------
aiCeivi9
Sounds like the case when EvE Online removed some Windows boot files:
[https://www.eveonline.com/article/about-the-boot.ini-
issue](https://www.eveonline.com/article/about-the-boot.ini-issue)

~~~
Zenst
Ah bless, I recall that (played at the time), I was fortunate to of had
separate drives for programs and temp/swap to the OS and didn't have eve
installed upon th C: drive, but knew many who didn't. That said, it was
somebody who did the same kind of thing that tested the update and equally had
no issue and it rolled out. Though fair play, they put their hands up fast and
if needed, paid for peoples to get a tech to fix the issue for users who just
gamed and unable to handle the minutiae of fixing themselves.

------
holstvoogd
Sounds like another 'DRM so strong you can't even boot anymore!'

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
DRM so strong they can’t even produce the film.

------
wizardforhire
Oh man I’d hate to be on the receiving end of this shit storm. There’s a film
called swimming with sharks [1] that perfectly illustrates the wrath of
producers

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swimming_with_Sharks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swimming_with_Sharks)

------
x86_64Ubuntu
Did anyone else get a drive-by download from
synchroscript.deliveryengine.adswizz.com?

~~~
jboggan
Yes, what was that?

~~~
x86_64Ubuntu
I have no idea. It was a 0 byte afp.php file. You only really get those when a
webserver isn't setup to process the PHP files and ends up sending it out like
a download.

------
tjpnz
Is this really an issue localised to LA? I've worked for companies equipped
with Avid suites that were (at least in geographic terms) as far away as you
can get from LA.

------
IOT_Apprentice
Well, looks like Google has some splaining to do in this incident.

------
lukeh
One Twitter thread I followed said something was trashing /var.

~~~
mohlmag
Its unlinking /var from /private/var and laying down a new incomplete /var

------
tinus_hn
Isn’t this just the Google Updater issue that removes the /var link on Macs
that have SIP disabled? Perhaps that is required for Avid?

------
tmikaeld
Hm, I'm not using any AVID software, but I had to re-install from Time Machine
after trying the 10.14.6 update on my Mac Mini 2018 last week.

------
KibbutzDalia
I switched to Adobe Premiere under Windows 10 with NVIDA 2080 for accelerated
rendering and have been very satisfied.

~~~
Waterluvian
It's really warming to me that Avid and Premiere, two applications I learned
video editing on at school when I was 10, are still big things today.

------
bananamerica
Why people still use Avid?

~~~
holy_city
Because it's the industry standard when you need to work with more than one
person. Most other offerings don't scale with team size/production pipeline
like Pro Tools/Media Composer.

And there's a certain class of professional who resists change/upgrades at
every turn, specifically because of stuff like this where updates would
typically break everything.

------
693471
How is this possible with SIP in modern MacOS?

Did they turn SIP off?

~~~
dannyw
SIP is a whitelist, not a blacklist. It's possible they (Apple) missed
something.

------
kalev
The use of 'trashcan' to refer to the MacPro by multiple users in the link is
pretty amusing.

> Has anyone had their trashcans go down today out of nowhere?

~~~
Havoc
That must really be annoying someone over at apple. Spend all that time design
something beautiful. And... Everyone calls it garbage

~~~
NightlyDev
Beautiful? There's a reason why it got the name, it looks like a trashcan. And
the old mac pro is filled with garbage(how fitting, right?). If it was any
good then apple would have stuck to it, but it was garbage, so they didn't.

Now we have the new mac pro, and it's a big step up from the trashcan.

~~~
ryanlol
Yes, and lots of very smart designers have put lots of time over many decades
into making trashcans look good.

The apple trashcan certainly looks _vastly_ better than other commercially
available workstations.

~~~
nickpeterson
It's a shame really, I feel like we've lost something from the years of SGI
workstations that looked like they came straight from the future.

~~~
dzhiurgis
You mean bright LED's and transformer-like mods?

I don't think so, seems like ALL gaming PC's are like that.

~~~
dagw
SGI workstations had hardly any lights. Their essential distinguishing feature
where that they sometimes had slightly rounded corners and came in 'fun'
colors. Kind of like this

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Tezro#/media/File:Silicone...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Tezro#/media/File:Silicone_Graphics_SGI_Tezro_Workstation.jpg)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Octane#/media/File:SgiOcta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Octane#/media/File:SgiOctane.jpg)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_O2#/media/File:Silicon_Gra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_O2#/media/File:Silicon_Graphics_O2_Plus.jpg)

~~~
mrguyorama
Those unfortunately now just remind me of the Hot Wheels PC
[https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/azdp7i/hot_wh...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/azdp7i/hot_wheels_pc/)

I'd rather see more like the SGI Indy workstation:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy#/media/File:Silicon_G...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy#/media/File:Silicon_Graphics_Indy.jpg)

~~~
te_chris
I think Sony's got your back there. Looks like a source of inspiration for the
PS4

------
pnako
>Film and TV editors across Los Angeles were sweating Monday evening as their
workstations were refusing to reboot

The irony of something refusing to reboot in Hollywood. Hopefully the
production of Star Wars 12, Rambo 8 and Terminator 9 has not been too
disrupted.

~~~
gnrlst
The rebellion has got to start from somewhere. Humans are still consuming
mindless reboots, but the machines have decided it's too much and have given
up.

------
rolltiide
Whats with this kneejerk advice?

Honestly who turns off their macs? Are they talking about sleep mode?

~~~
imdsm
I had an issue recently with Virtualbox which caused my iMac Pro to crash and
power cycle. That, as well as certain Xcode updates (required by other
software), meant I lost my 200+ days of workstation uptime.

~~~
pdimitar
Do you have any idea how exactly did VirtualBox crash your iMac Pro? I’m
pondering installing it on mine and your comment is scary.

