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from the honestly,-it's-for-your-own-good... dept.
Safari will, later this year, no longer accept new HTTPS certificates that expire more than 13 months from their creation date. That means websites using long-life SSL/TLS certs issued after the cut-off point will throw up privacy errors in Apple's browser.
The policy was unveiled by the iGiant at a Certification Authority Browser Forum (CA/Browser) meeting on Wednesday. Specifically, according to those present at the confab, from September 1, any new website cert valid for more than 398 days will not be trusted by the Safari browser and instead rejected. Older certs, issued prior to the deadline, are unaffected by this rule.
By implementing the policy in Safari, Apple will, by extension, enforce it on all iOS and macOS devices. This will put pressure on website admins and developers to make sure their certs meet Apple's requirements – or risk breaking pages on a billion-plus devices and computers.
[...] Shortening the lifespan of certificates does come with some drawbacks. It has been noted that by increasing the frequency of certificate replacements, Apple and others are also making life a little more complicated for site owners and businesses that have to manage the certificates and compliance.
"Companies need to look to automation to assist with certificate deployment, renewal, and lifecycle management to reduce human overhead and the risk of error as the frequency of certificate replacement increase," Callan told us.
We note Let's Encrypt issues free HTTPS certificates that expire after 90 days, and provides tools to automate renewals, so those will be just fine – and they are used all over the web now. El Reg's cert is a year-long affair so we'll be OK.
GitHub.com uses a two-year certificate, which would fall foul of Apple's rules though it was issued before the cut-off deadline. However, it is due to be renewed by June, so there's plenty of opportunity to sort that out. Apple's website has a year-long HTTPS cert that needs renewing in October.
Microsoft is an interesting one: its dot-com's cert is a two-year affair, which expires in October. If Redmond renews it for another two years, it'll trip up over Safari's policy.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday February 24 2020, @08:53PM (5 children)
It will affect everyone. Safari users are going to whine far more (about 81% more) loudly than users of other browsers. So YOU WILL be affected.
This affects you more if you run a web site or web application than if you are someone using a web browser. If you are just browsing, then yes, by all means, switch from Safari to a browser on Linux.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday February 24 2020, @09:31PM (3 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday February 25 2020, @04:29AM (2 children)
It depends on the country, the language, and the overall income level of the visitors to a particular website. Industrialized anglophone countries (USA, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, NZ) have a greater usage share of iOS (and thus Safari and other browsers sharing its engine) than other countries. For example, caniuse.com reports that 80.3 percent of users of tracked web browsers worldwide can play Ogg Vorbis audio [caniuse.com], but only 50.8 percent of users in the United States can. This is due to the greater usage share of iOS in the United States compared to elsewhere. And even within a country, higher-income residents of those countries are more likely to use iOS. So if your target market is high-income residents of industrialized anglophone countries, you need to accommodate Safari.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:06PM (1 child)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:22PM
That depends on having an administration in federal office and justices on the Supreme Court that care about "anticompetitive behaviour and unfair trade practices" in the first place. I was outvoted in 2016.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday February 25 2020, @11:03AM
I'm not sure sure in this case. The 81% whine superiority is Apple users whining about how much better their tech is than everyone else's [Source: Journal of the Bratislavan Philological Society]. In this case the tech is actually worse, so there may be much less whining, or even none at all. We'll have to wait for the study results to be published.