Tagged: Mac

Mac OS Mojave 10.14.4 and “Google Password Required” Authentication Messages

Update: The error just “magically” went away and authentication now works.

After Apple’s “It’s Show Time” Event on Monday, March 25, the company released updated versions of macOS and iOS to launch the new Apple News+ subscription service, and I updated all my devices accordingly. The update also included some security enhancements to Safari.

At some point after updating my MacBook Pro to 10.14.4, a series of notifications appeared alerting me that my “Google Password [was] Required.” In all, three notifications appears, one for each of my three Google accounts.1

GooglePasswordRequired

Clicking on the notifications brought me to the Internet Accounts pane in System Preferences where I was prompted to re-authenticate each of my three accounts.

But as Stephen Hacket and Kirk McElhern posted in their blogs, as well as dozens of other users posted on an Apple Support Communities discussion page, the authentication process doesn’t finish and we are asked to “Enter the password for the account: user@gsuitedomain.xxxx. Google requires completing authentication in Safari” as illustrated below.

EnterThePasswordfortheAccount

The problem only occurs on my MacBook Pro running the latest version of Mojave 10.14.4, and it has not affected an older iMac I use at work running High Sierra 10.13.6, even after I updated to Safari 12.1. The authentication scheme in the older version of macOS used a different browser window to complete authentication.

Safari 12.1 has two different build numbers: 13607.1.40.1.5 for the one running on 10.13.6, and 14607.1.40.1.4 for the one running on 10.4.4.

Safari 12 1 10 13 6 10 14 4
The different builds for Safari 12.1. The one on the left is for High Sierra 10.13.6, and the one on the right is for Mojave 10.14.4. Note how the Mac is running High Sierra because it’s too old to run Mojave and that it as a non-Retina display.

Users have been posting a bunch of suggestions to clear up this problem, but none of their suggestions have helped me. For the record, here’s some of the steps I have taken:

  • I removed account from all my computers and re-added the account to both computers. I can/could access the three Google accounts on the older iMac (10.13.6) but only one of them the MacBook Pro (10.14.4), as I noted above.
  • I deleted Keychain entries for anything related to Google. As soon as I successfully re-authenticate with the one account that works, noted above, I see three new Application Password keys for com.apple.account.Google.oauth-token.
  • I turned off content blockers in the Private Window.. The new authentication scheme in Internet Accounts uses a Private Browsing Safari window, which looks a bit like how you sign in to a Wi-Fi’s Captive Portal page. There’s an option to turn off Content Blockers.
  • I disabled 1Blocker in Safari. I use 1Blocker in Safari and disabling it did not solve the problem.
  • I cleared all my cookies in Safari. And now I have to re-authenticate to everything, not just these three Google accounts.
  • I turned off “Prevent Cross-Site Tracking” in Safari. I can’t authenticate whether this option is activated or not.
  • In Google’s Security settings page, I removed access for “Mac OS” to access my Google account. But after you authenticate, Google detects that macOS has been granted access again, yet macOS can’t connect to the account.
  • Yes, I rebooted and logged off. I actually did this first because this almost always fix the problem, right? Not in this case, sadly.

The weird thing is that I am able to authenticate to one Google account but not the other two. A few users have similarly noted that it works for one account but not for a second (or third account).

Another thing is that some users have reported having similar problems on their iOS devices after updating to iOS 12.2, but I have not encountered these issues on iOS.

At this point, I’ve resigned to using the web interfaces for Gmail and Google calendar on these accounts until releases an update to address this error.

Update: I have been using third-party apps to access my Google accounts on my Mac.

  • For my calendar, I had already been using Fantastical.
  • For email, I had tried out Airmail on two occasions over the years. Once back with version 1 and again with version 3 last fall. I have had mixed results with third-party clients, such as using Sparrow in 2012. However, I reinstalled Airmail 3 until Apple figures out and patches this bug.

  1. I actually have four Google accounts, and such is the life of the contract employee. ↩

When Did You Last Use a Typewriter?

Typewriter from The Shining

An article from Farhad Manjoo, formerly of Slate and soon to be formerly of the Wall Street Journal, is making the rounds on the Internet. His point is simple:

Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.

This is old news, and not just because the article appears to have been published three years ago. (See the update at the bottom of the page.)

It’s old news because I remember reading this back in 1997 or so, when I was in college and working at UCSB Extension on the tech support team.1 On a slow day, I skimmed through a book we had on the shelf, The Mac is Not a Typewriter. It didn’t necessarily change my life, but it had many lessons on how to compose a manuscript on a Mac, or any computer, that have stuck with me. One of the cardinal lessons was to only use a single space after a period, especially if you were using a proportional-width font. Although I don’t have a copy of the book, but if memory serves, it was because you needed two spaces on a typewriter to distinguish an abbreviation and a sentence.

For example:

New York City has many churches. St. Patrick's Cathedral is perhaps the best known.

Can you tell the difference between the end of the sentence “New York City has many churches” and the abbreviation for “Saint?” That’s why you needed to use two spaces after a period on a typewriter. Such is not the case on a computer.

There were a few other lessons that I recall from the Mac is Not a Typewriter:

  • Watch for widows and orphans.
  • Use smart quotes instead of straight ones.
  • The differences between a hyphen, an en-dash, and a em-dash.
  • Why underline when you can easily italicize?

The book appears to have been last updated in 2003. While that might seem like an eternity, a great deal of those lessons are still relevant today.

The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.

  1. Does anyone know when technology folks started working in “teams” instead of “groups”? That seems to be a fairly recent thing. ↩