At The Verge, Tim Carmody reports on Apple's seeming inability to get to grips with account security.
"The conventional wisdom is that this was a run-of-the-mill software security issue. ... No. It isn’t. It’s a troubling symptom that suggests Apple’s self-admittedly bumpy transition from a maker of beautiful devices to a fully-fledged cloud services provider still isn’t going smoothly. Meanwhile, your Apple ID password has come a long way from the short string of characters you tap to update apps on your iPhone. It now offers access to Apple’s entire ecosystem of devices, stores, software, and services."
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Starting in 2000, Walmart began an aggressive cost-cutting campaign that removed greeters, reduced floor staff, and replaced cashiers with automated checkouts; the more this went on, the higher the crime-rate at Walmart soared, everything from shoplifting to deadly violence. In true Walmart style, the world’s largest retailer has offloaded the costs associated with this crime […]
I’m keynoting the O’Reilly Security Conference in New York in Oct/Nov, so I stopped by the O’Reilly Security Podcast (MP3) to explain EFF’s Apollo 1201 project, which aims to kill all the DRM in the world within a decade.
The news that a group of anonymous hackers claimed to have stolen some of the NSA’s most secret, valuable weaponized vulnerabilities and were auctioning them off for bitcoin triggered an epic tweetstorm from Edward Snowden, who sets out his hypothesis for how the exploits were captured and what relation that has to the revelations he […]
We’re always searching for, borrowing, and losing Lightning cables, and that’s why we are loading up with the Apple MFi-Certified Lightning Cable: 3-Pack.These Apple-certified USB cables let you charge your iPhone, iPad, or iPod via any USB port—whether you prefer your computer or the Apple USB Power Adapter. And since there’s three of them, you never […]
Mophie’s gadgets are reliable, minimalist, and stacked with all the right features. We use these two gadgets to keep our phones, tablets, e-readers, and other electronics charged.Recharge on-the-go with the Mophie Powerstation XL External BatteryThe Mophie Powerstation XL ($39.95) packs enough power to re-charge your phone eight times over. It has three levels of charging, so […]
Earlier this spring, Salesforce announced that Amazon Web Services (AWS) would be its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider. Salesforce developers and AWS developers are already in-demand and paid very well for their expertise, but this partnership opens up the opportunity to become an extremely valuable asset by mastering both. Below are two in-depth courses to help you start or progress […]
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Apple seems committed to learning the hard way that if you retain control of something, it remains your problem.
Also remember how Apple got spanked hard back in the 90s, their era of clones, third-party hardware and developers.
Sure Apple may be taking it too far, but their stance can be explained, and just look at those sales figures and cash reserves, warts and all their business model is working for them.
I’m not nearly foolish enough to argue with Apple on the business side; but I would argue that their ‘all Apple, all proprietary, all the time’ stance has inflicted a number of technical black eyes.
‘Apple ID’ now has a finger in every pie, so it’s gone from being a more-or-less-webmail level account to the key to the kingdom, without a corresponding increase in actual security.
Arstechnica had an article in the past day or two about how much trouble ‘iCloud’ has been giving people, an app-gets-kicked-out-of-app-store controversy seems to happen about once a week.
Also: corporate IT puts up with it because users demand the things; but damn are iDevices hostile to administer. Apple literally has a list(well, it’s literally an xml plist, because this is apple) of parameters you can remotely manage. If it isn’t on there, you can go cry about it.
Apple is often very good at what they do; but they do not seem to be good at letting go of what they don’t do, or willing to take the risk that, by letting the ‘ecosystem’ do it for them, they might open a chink in their armor.
The cash speaks for itself; but they are already courting scenarios where their products are worse than they could have been, because of the desire to keep a tight grip. If they aren’t careful, they might end up going all the way to ‘worse than they could have been, making them worse than the competition’.
I completely agree. I’ve used Apple since the late 80s and I agree with your post overall, it’s time for the pendulum to swing back and it’s mostly to do with the software. Gotta give credit to their machinery, but:
My browser of preference? Firefox.
Email? Entourage.
Office apps? Word and Excel.
Video viewing? VLC.
My iPhone? Jailbroken.
Etcetera. I don’t sync my apps nor accounts and I’m not interested.
The only piece of Apple software that truly blows me away is the subsidiary Filemaker.
“…it’s literally an xml plist, because this is apple…”
Well done, sir. I’ve now spit coffee all over my MBP.
It’s Tim Cook. He is just too square for words. What kind of guru is that?