I called Applecare about this, the guy on the phone told me to just click cancel, and he didn’t see anything wrong with this. Because it ultimately undermines the safety of users on the web by eroding that relationship. Because it means that an update isn’t just an update, but is maybe something more. It’s wrong because it undermines the trust that we’re all trying to build with users. This is wrong, and borders on malware distribution practices. Apple has made it incredibly easy - the default, even - for users to install ride along software that they didn’t ask for, and maybe didn’t want. That’s a problem because of the dynamic I described above - by and large, all software makers are trying to get users to trust us on updates, and so the likely behavior here is for users to just click “Install 2 items,” which means that they’ve now installed a completely new piece of software, quite possibly completely unintentionally. The problem here is that it lists Safari for getting an update - and has the “Install” box checked by default - even if you haven’t ever installed Safari on your PC. ![]() Here’s screen that comes up on Windows XP if you’ve got iTunes installed: Makes everyone more likely to have current, patched versions of Apple’s software, and makes everyone safer. ![]() And when the user trusts the software maker, they’ll generally go ahead and install the patch, keeping themselves and everyone else safe.Īnyone who uses iTunes on Windows has Apple Software Update installed on their machines, which does just what I’ve described above: it checks for new patches available for Apple-produced software on your Windows machine, alerts the user to the availability, and allows updates to be installed. There’s an implicit trust relationship between software makers and customers in this regard: as a software maker we promise to do our very best to keep users safe and will provide the quickest updates possible, with absolutely no other agenda. As a result, Firefox users are incredibly up to date, and adopt very quickly. We look at the data every time we do an update we obsess about what we call “uptake rates” - the percentage of Firefox users who are on the most current version of the browser a day or a week or a month after release. That’s why Mozilla spends so much time making sure our own Automatic Update Service works, and why we spend so much time agonizing over the user interface for the updates. If people don’t update software regularly, it is impossible for them to remain safe good software developers are creating improvements constantly. ![]() It’s also critically, crucially important for the security of end users and for the security of the Web at large that people stay current. Keeping software up to date is hard - hard for consumers to understand what patches are for, how to make sure they’re up to date. What they did yesterday was to use their updater for iTunes to also install their Safari Web browser –what follows is some background and analysis. It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that’s bad - not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web. What Apple is doing now with their Apple Software Update on Windows is wrong.
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