A change in MacOS in the past week or two appears to have blocked local file reading by signed Java applets running Java 7. I’ve illustrated the problem with a working example and full source code at http://www.segal.org/java/localFileRead/. The problem does not seem to be related to Java 7 update 45 since it also occurs with Update 40, and that had been working fine until a week or two ago, as assessed by reports from users of a large applet. The demo applet was prepared to demo the problem using concise code.
A signed applet is supposed to be able to read and write local files. Although this capability is restricted on some institutional networks, this is the first time these abilities have been restricted for individual users. Does anyone know whether this is a bug, or done purposely by Apple? Are there any workarounds of settings that a user can set to allow such file reading? Since this appears to represent a change by Apple, should this be reported as an Apple bug, an Oracle Java bug, or both?
