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posted by janrinok on Monday February 24 2020, @07:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the honestly,-it's-for-your-own-good... dept.

Apple drops a bomb on long-life HTTPS certificates: Safari to snub new security certs valid for more than 13 months:

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @03:34AM (16 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @03:34AM (#962193)

    <sarcasm>Commie! Money is king here! I bet you believe in that "open sores" crap
    </sarcasm>

  • (Score: 3, Disagree) by barbara hudson on Tuesday February 25 2020, @03:44AM (15 children)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Tuesday February 25 2020, @03:44AM (#962205) Journal
    I believe in open source. I don't believe in the GPL. Without the GPL there would be way more software available for Linux, which would have made it more competitive.
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    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @08:45AM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @08:45AM (#962290)

      Without GPL Linux would have the fate of BSD at best, which is used, say, in PlayStation, but you'll have to pay premium to use it, locked down. Bright future, yay.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:21PM (4 children)

        by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:21PM (#962367) Journal
        Apple built OSX atop FreeBSD. It's got a lot more market penetration because FreeBSD is NOT using the restrictive GPL. Now look at the difference in available software for OSX compared to Linux. Linux could have had the same situation if it weren't for the GPL.
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        • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @11:06PM (3 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @11:06PM (#962595)

          You mean I'd have to pay hundreds of dollars to buy specific hardware from a single manufacturer to use Linux? Sounds great! I better get in my time machine to warn Linus about the mistake he is going to make.

          • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday February 26 2020, @01:45AM (2 children)

            by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday February 26 2020, @01:45AM (#962652) Journal
            FreeBSD runs on Wintel and you know it, so don't be intentionally stupid. And I guess you never heard of Hackintoshes if you really want the Quartz UI.
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            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @06:22AM (1 child)

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @06:22AM (#962738)

              But all the software that you think Apple enabled for FreeBSD only run if the entire OS including the GUI is there. Which means you need a Hackintosh, which still requires certain combinations of hardware, runs the risk of getting nuked on an update, and requires an already working MacOS system to install.

              • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday February 26 2020, @10:15PM

                by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday February 26 2020, @10:15PM (#963164) Journal

                But all the software that you think Apple enabled for FreeBSD only run if the entire OS including the GUI is there.

                Actually, that's not true. Go do some research. Apple contributed non-gui stuff back to FreeBSD that runs just fine on FreeBSD, with or without a GUI. Apple isn't the greatest, but they do give back, and Linux has benefited indirectly from their contributions.

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    • (Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday February 25 2020, @06:23PM (8 children)

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 25 2020, @06:23PM (#962464) Journal

      The unspoken purpose of GPL appears to be to prevent, specifically Microsoft, from taking the code, enhancing it, and putting the enhanced code into their own proprietary commercial badness.

      Without GPL the Embrace Extend Extinguish would have gone wild with the Microsoft. Just as Microsoft tried to do with Java, and got sued for $1.2 billion for violating the plain language of the agreement, Microsoft would try to get developers developers addicted to a Microsoft-flavor of open source that only runs on Microsoft and interoperates with Microsoft.

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      • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday February 26 2020, @02:24AM (7 children)

        by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday February 26 2020, @02:24AM (#962685) Journal

        Microsoft has FreeBSD code. I don't see it having "embrace'd, extend'd, extinguish'd" FreeBSD. MacOS is based on FreeBSD. I don't see FreeBSD disappearing - on the contrary, Apple contributes source code back.

        RMS was full of shit with his promise that the GPL would promote a flourishing software ecosystem. There's a lot more software choice with both Microsoft and Apple than with Linux.

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        • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday February 26 2020, @03:45PM (6 children)

          by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 26 2020, @03:45PM (#962907) Journal

          I cannot disagree that RMS was full of something about a number of things he said.

          If GPL had never been, if all software in the world had been FreeBSD, then I shudder to think what Microsoft might have done.

          The fact that the worst didn't happen to FreeBSD might possibly be due to the GPL being the real fight Microsoft engaged against. Microsoft called out the GPL by name. Called it viral. Said it was a threat and "un-American". Jim Allchin said some of this and Ballmer said other of it, calling it cancer, etc. It's simply been too long for me to remember exact quotes and attributions at this point. The Halloween documents were clearly 'triggered' by the GPL.

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          • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday February 26 2020, @10:30PM (5 children)

            by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday February 26 2020, @10:30PM (#963180) Journal

            And yet in the end, Linux the desktop lost and FreeBSD won. If Microsoft had decided to use FreeBSD, it would have attracted too much attention to FreeBSD and there might have been other competing OSes based on FreeBSD. That could only be a good thing.

            So now we have a duopoly on the desktop. Without the GPL, Linux could have been in the mix. And Microsoft IS moving on Linux.

            On phones, it's also a duopoly - Android (which is terribly designed - "hypercard for phones") and Apple.

            It's still a battle for laptops, but Chromebooks are pretty tied to Google and it's data centres. Not something I would ever use, but people want convenience over anything else.

            And the whole idIOT thing - George Orwell would be pissing himself because it's far beyond anything he ever dreamed of. But "convenience."

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            • (Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday February 27 2020, @03:27PM (4 children)

              by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 27 2020, @03:27PM (#963532) Journal

              And yet in the end, Linux the desktop lost and FreeBSD won.

              An interesting statement. Linux hasn't won the desktop. But has basically won everything else but the desktop. Almost any computer that is not desktop has Linux. I assume you refer to Apple as accounting for "FreeBSD + desktop" success. I'm not sure I would agree that FreeBSD is why Apple's desktop is successful. It already was successful in Mac OS 9 classic. FreeBSD was certainly a much better foundation for the evolution of Apple's products.

              That is also the point at which I parted ways with Apple and got into Linux.

              Android (which is terribly designed - "hypercard for phones") and Apple.

              I'm not overly impressed with Android's design. Before Android my favorite was that WebOS thing from Palm which ran on Linux and looked very interesting. But they just didn't realize what they had and didn't get behind it. Reminds me of Xerox PARC.

              Despite what I would have liked, Android is a pragmatic reality. It arguably has market dominance. It cannot be ignored if you want to build anything related to mobile phones or tablets.

              Chromebooks are pretty tied to Google and it's data centres.

              I disagree. The only tie of Chromebooks to Google is for updates to the OS. What you do with your chromebook is largely tied to the internet, but not specifically to Google. Chromebooks can be thought of as a "smart terminal" for the 21st century. Connecting to "mainframes" of the 21st century (eg, Kubernetes or similar style data centers, or other Linux clusters in data centers).

              You CAN, and I DO, use the local storage on my Pixelbook. It's a Chromebook, yes. But I use it in many ways like a Linux laptop computer. LibreOffice, local storage, and other Linux applications, including Eclipse, Java, Tomcat, etc. And it also runs Android apps which gives me another universe of applications outside of the Linux desktop applications.

              George Orwell would be pissing himself

              I can't disagree with that. Agree.

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              • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday February 28 2020, @02:50AM (3 children)

                by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Friday February 28 2020, @02:50AM (#963920) Journal

                It cannot be ignored if you want to build anything related to mobile phones or tablets.

                Au contraire, IOS generates more revenue for developers off a much smaller user base than Android does despite having several times the user base.

                If you have to devote your resources to one of the two platforms and you want to make money, it's IOS. Has been for more than a decade. Android users are cheap (that's an observation from devs for both platforms so don't blame me, mkay :-) ).

                That being said, Android can be shifted to operate atop FreeBSD instead of Linux (FreeBSD can run many Linux binaries without modification, and of course there's no reason that Android can't be completely ported to FreeBSD). The real problem with that is as soon as it becomes possible and it's leaked to the wild, anyone can fork it and be completely free of the Google walled garden for anything and everything.

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                • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 28 2020, @02:47PM (2 children)

                  by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 28 2020, @02:47PM (#964116) Journal

                  IOS generates more revenue for developers off a much smaller user base than Android does despite having several times the user base.

                  Thus: iOS good for developers, Android good for end users.

                  Android can't be completely ported to FreeBSD

                  Or Fuchsia.

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                  People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
                  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday February 28 2020, @05:02PM (1 child)

                    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Friday February 28 2020, @05:02PM (#964170) Journal

                    I would say that there's a distinct lack of choice in Android apps - they are mostly adware-supported. That's not good for the users in either the short or long term. Then again, it's not like people should be loading up on apps anyway, on either Android or IOS. Part of the whole "get a life, people" thing.

                    In that sense smartphones are a public health menace, and not just from distracted driving/walking ... I used to be a skeptic when it came to Internet addiction, but I've seen people are totally addicted to social media and online games, so I've changed my opinion 180 degrees, based on observational evidence.

                    When I'm sick, I can't just loll around in bed and read a book (still can't read a paper book) so I'll post here. But it becomes onerous as I get better, because I would rather be around people. It's not that the internet is a poor substitute - it isn't any sort of substitute. And yet we have people who voluntarily choose to self-isolate in the alternate reality online. I'm not optimistic of the future, and smartphones, regardless of operating system, are just too damn convenient for most people to avoid being continuously distracted by them.

                    In the end, the motivations of devs on both platforms is the same - eyeballs, either to generate ad revenue or paid revenue.

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                    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 28 2020, @06:11PM

                      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 28 2020, @06:11PM (#964228) Journal

                      I've come to realize that having hundreds of millions of apps in an app store is pretty meaningless. What matters is that there are apps that are useful to you.

                      I've found some ad supported apps that I like. I've found other apps that I felt worth paying for, both because I liked the app, and wanted to avoid ads.

                      Years ago I settled onto a collection of apps that I like.
                      * calculators, several
                      * network apps, ping, dns, ssh client, ftp server/client, traceroute, network analyzers, etc
                      * a preferred file manager
                      * a couple music players
                      * notepad type app
                      * midi apps
                      * several puzzle games, especially "Unblock me" (aka "traffic jam") for which I've written a Java solver for, for amusement
                      * a favorite sleep sounds app, rarely used
                      * home control apps
                      * browsers
                      * Google: hangouts, keep, docs, maps, gmail, etc.
                      * Signal
                      * News apps
                      * a favorite Bible app with in-app purchases (multiple translations, commentaries, etc)
                      * streaming video apps (Netflix, HBO, etc)

                      That, I think about covers it When I get a new phone, all those apps just appear on the new device.

                      I rarely look in the play store for new things.

                      Despite all those apps, I don't spend much time looking at my phone. I only use the phone for specific purposes. To read at a regular time. Check news at a fairly regular time. Occasional messaging with family members or close friends.

                      I DO NOT use any social media ever. So no Facebook, Twitter accounts ever.

                      So I'm not of the texting & walking type. I think the "social" media apps are the biggest to blame for that. I think people who use social networks are the least happy. Or shortest attention span. One time when I was at Epcot, after dark, outside Mission Space, I saw someone texting and walking -- right into a park bench. It happened so quick.

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