Followed one of the links in your article and ended up unexpectedly watching a video review of different types of canned fish (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rymwqxBkxus). Wasn't expecting that, but I must say I did rather enjoy it.
>To my knowledge, this can be fixed by requesting the OS-level accessibility permissions, which would require a separate user interaction.
Does this imply that running Gregglogger _doesn't_ require granting accessibility input monitoring permission? On osx there's at least 4 ways to monitor inputs I think (iokit level, cgeventap, carbon event monitoring, cocoa global event monitor), I'd really expect all of them to require the input monitoring permission.
It looks like you're correct -- Gregglogger relies on pynput, and its behavior on macOS aligns with the library's documented limitations [1]:
Recent versions of macOS restrict monitoring of the keyboard for security reasons. For that reason, one of the following must be true:
- The process must run as root.
- Your application must be whitelisted under "Enable access for assistive devices." Note that this might require packaging your application, since otherwise the entire Python installation must be whitelisted.
- On macOS versions after Mojave, you may also need to whitelist your terminal application if running your script from a terminal.
I also wrote a 5ish line python script that instead of logging keys, presses them. I used it to avoid idle detection in a game a few years ago. Similarly to you, I found it somewhat disconcerting how easy it was. This was on windows though.
Hi, I’m the “greg”. AMA??
But also, this is Rafal’s project. I’m just a huge huge fan of his..! See:
https://sit.sonnet.io/
https://untested.sonnet.io/
And https://www.potato.horse/ !
Followed one of the links in your article and ended up unexpectedly watching a video review of different types of canned fish (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rymwqxBkxus). Wasn't expecting that, but I must say I did rather enjoy it.
>To my knowledge, this can be fixed by requesting the OS-level accessibility permissions, which would require a separate user interaction.
Does this imply that running Gregglogger _doesn't_ require granting accessibility input monitoring permission? On osx there's at least 4 ways to monitor inputs I think (iokit level, cgeventap, carbon event monitoring, cocoa global event monitor), I'd really expect all of them to require the input monitoring permission.
It looks like you're correct -- Gregglogger relies on pynput, and its behavior on macOS aligns with the library's documented limitations [1]:
Recent versions of macOS restrict monitoring of the keyboard for security reasons. For that reason, one of the following must be true:
- The process must run as root.
- Your application must be whitelisted under "Enable access for assistive devices." Note that this might require packaging your application, since otherwise the entire Python installation must be whitelisted.
- On macOS versions after Mojave, you may also need to whitelist your terminal application if running your script from a terminal.
[1] https://pynput.readthedocs.io/en/stable/limitations.html#mac...
Fun read, thanks.
I also wrote a 5ish line python script that instead of logging keys, presses them. I used it to avoid idle detection in a game a few years ago. Similarly to you, I found it somewhat disconcerting how easy it was. This was on windows though.