alt Hacker NewsI love when my Mac declares random PDFs malware and deletes them when I try to open them.
On two occasions I've been completely dumbstruck when the software I was using was deleted out from under me. I'm not a fan of the overuse of "gaslight", but it sure felt like that when I had to restart Docker and the OS was like "what do you mean, Docker? You've never had Docker installed! What are you talking about? Are you feeling ok?"
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In ten years of using Macs, I have never encountered this behaviour. I've never heard this from anyone else either. Is this new in Tahoe? I haven't upgraded yet, but your link seems to be from before Tahoe was released.
Maybe the PDFs were malware?
Sorry to say but your PDFs were malware. In 20+ years I’ve never seen this on my Macs nor the literal thousands I’ve managed with various MDMs.
Just as a contrapoint to the other commenters, I've had Mac do this on PDFs that I myself scanned many years ago. Pretty sure they were not malware.
I suspect what triggered it was the fact that the files had journeyed through many filesystems in their time - HFS, ext4, NTFS, APFS - and they probably picked up some unholy combination of impossible attributes.
I thought it was pretty egregious to have Apple helpfully try to delete important PDFs that I've been lugging around for years.