Criticism
Software Update uses predictable TCP sequence numbers and plain text HTTP. Neither the command line nor GUI tools allow the user to use unpredictable sequence numbers or HTTPS. Mac OS X 10.8 uses HTTPS by default and allows a user to downgrade to HTTP, but still uses predictable sequence numbers.
Apple's Software Update download server allows weak and wounded ciphers, and the server does not support secure renegotiation. Performing test connections using openssl s_client showed the server would agree to RC4-MD5. In fact, ARC4-MD5 was the server's preferred cipher. While confidentiality is not an issue (everyone gets the same update), authenticity is an issue and user must have assurances that they are communicating with the expected server and the communications are not tampered (MD5 is considered insecure by the cryptographic community, and should not be used).
In March 2008, Apple began offering its web browser, Safari, through Apple Software Update for Windows. The Safari download was selected by default for installation by Apple Software Update. After significant criticism from the IT community, Apple changed its policy and Safari was no longer selected by default for download. Apple Software Update for Windows now offers new software and an optional download, in addition to updates for already-installed software.
Read more about this topic: Apple Software Update
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)