Apple holds the mas­ter decryp­tion key when it comes to iCloud secu­rity, pri­vacy [Ars Tech­nica]

The folks at Ars Tech­nica noticed the same thing I did about their ear­lier arti­cle and actu­ally investigated.

‘Microsoft We Don’t Feel So Good About’.

David Gelles and Richard Waters, in a piece titled “Google Ditches Win­dows on Secu­rity Con­cerns” in the Finan­cial Times:

New hires are now given the option of using Apple’s Mac
com­put­ers or PCs run­ning the Linux oper­at­ing sys­tem. “Linux is
open source and we feel good about it,” said one employee.
“Microsoft we don’t feel so good about.”

[Dar­ing Fire­ball]

I wish the “secu­rity” com­pany I worked for had that much sense. Unfor­tu­nately, they make it as hard to get Mac (or Linux) machines as Google has made it to get Win­dows. And since the Pow­ers That Be decided to “out­source” our entire IT depart­ment to a com­pany that man­u­fac­tures Win­dows PCs, I don’t expect that to change any time soon.

Secu­rity Cer­tifi­cate Warn­ings Don’t Work. angry tapir writes “In a lab­o­ra­tory exper­i­ment, researchers found that between 55 per­cent and 100 per­cent of par­tic­i­pants ignored cer­tifi­cate secu­rity warn­ings, depend­ing on which browser they were using (dif­fer­ent browsers use dif­fer­ent lan­guage to warn their users). The researchers first con­ducted an online sur­vey of more than 400 Web surfers, to learn what they thought about cer­tifi­cate warn­ings. They then brought 100 peo­ple into a lab and stud­ied how they surf the Web. They found that peo­ple often had a mixed-up under­stand­ing of cer­tifi­cate warn­ings. For exam­ple, many thought they could ignore the mes­sages when vis­it­ing a site they trust, but that they should be more wary at less-trustworthy sites.“

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slash­dot]

Every time I’ve encoun­tered a cer­tifi­cate warn­ing it’s been for a per­fectly valid but self-issued cer­tifi­cate. If the peo­ple in the exper­i­ment have had sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences, it’s not sur­pris­ing they would have got­ten into the habit of ignor­ing the warnings.