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Today, Apple announced their “Most Personal Device Ever”. They also announced Apple Pay (the only mentions of “security” and “privacy” in today’s event), and are rolling out health tracking and home automation in iOS 8. Given their feckless track record [with cloud-service security], would you really trust Apple with (even more of) your digital life?
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Excellent post from Dan Kaminsky on concrete actions that cloud service providers like Apple and Google need to start taking.
*It’s time to ban Password1*: […] Defenders are using simple rules like “doesn’t have an uppercase letter” and “not enough punctuation” to block passwords while attackers are just straight up analyzing password dumps and figuring out the most likely passwords to attempt in any scenario. Attackers are just way ahead. That has to change. Defenders have password dumps too now. It’s time we start outright blocking passwords common enough that they can be online brute forced, and it’s time we admit we know what they are. […] *People use communication technologies for sexy times. Deal with it*: Just like browsers have porn mode for the personal consumption of private imagery, cell phones have applications that are significantly less likely to lead to anyone else but your special friends seeing your special bits. I personally advise Wickr, an instant messaging firm that develops secure software for iPhone and Android. What’s important about Wickr here isn’t just the deep crypto they’ve implemented, though it’s useful too. What’s important in this context is that with this code there’s just a lot fewer places to steal your data from. Photos and other content sent in Wickr don’t get backed up to your desktop, don’t get saved in any cloud, and by default get removed from your friend’s phone after an amount of time you control. Wickr is of course not the only company supporting what’s called “ephemeral messaging”; SnapChat also dramatically reduces the exposure of your private imagery. […]
via Leonard.(tags: icloud apple privacy security via:lhl snapchat wickr dan-kaminsky cloud-services backup)
Inside Apple’s Live Event Stream Failure, And Why It Happened: It Wasn’t A Capacity Issue
The bottom line with this event is that the encoding, translation, JavaScript code, the video player, the call to S3 single storage location and the millisecond refreshes all didn’t work properly together and was the root cause of Apple’s failed attempt to make the live stream work without any problems. So while it would be easy to say it was a CDN capacity issue, which was my initial thought considering how many events are taking place today and this week, it does not appear that a lack of capacity played any part in the event not working properly. Apple simply didn’t provision and plan for the event properly.