I have some good news - although they don't seem to actually have a really ready yet.

The setup they are using is completely adequate for securing the privacy of communication between the user and Apple's server.

TFA describes how they eavesdropped on the communication between the user and Apple's server. Doesn't sound very secure to me.

I think you have missed my point. If the certificate is signed by some random authority it is "valid" but that only says that the authority (whoever that is) trusts the server. If the client did as it should (and what other Apple apps do), then it should check that the certificate is signed by a authority that it can check directly using the authority's public key built into the client.

That way it would be impossible to spoof the server and perform man-in-the-middle attack without either a) knowing the private key of Apple's signing authority (in which case Apple has bigger problems than people cracking Siri) or b) modifying the binary of the client application itself (always possible not matter what you do).

I just find it interesting that some applications do this properly, and others just seem to say "The cert looks legit to me, let's talk some secret stuff".

I have just done this. That exact text (as far as I can tell) is included in the text about 7/8ths of the way through.

So it looks like Apple is in the clear on this point.

TFA is actually pretty interesting:

As you know, the “S” in HTTPS stands for “secure” : all traffic between a client and an https server is ciphered. So we couldn’t read it using a sniffer. In that case, the simplest solution is to fake an HTTPS server, use a fake DNS server, and see what the incoming requests are. Unfortunately, the people behind Siri did things right : they check that guzzoni’s certificate is valid, so you cannot fake it. Well they did check that it was valid, but thing is, you can add your own “root certificate”, which lets you mark any certificate you want as valid.

Some Apple software (parts of iTunes) goes further and checks that the certificate presented by the server is actually signed by Apple. If the Siri software did this then the server would be impossible to fake man-in-middle-wise without hacking the client itself. Just checking that the certificate is valid is pretty useless protection - any certificate could be valid, what you care about is whether the server is who it says it is.

When your company is circling the drain, and all your previous products don't cut it, then yes, you bet everything on something new, because if you don't, your out of the race anyways. This is what jobs did with OSX, and led to his other stuff.

MacOS was pretty crusty at that point, and Apple hadn't had a breakout product for years but the company was far from dead when Jobs came back. Apple still had a lot of money in the bank - any other company would have limped along for years and then sold itself to one of the giants. Jobs could have done that and been considered a success, but he chose not to.

The iPhone was the real turning point. A lot of people thought that there was no way that Apple could worm its way into the entrenched cell phone market, Apple did so by doing a complete endrun around the traditional telco channels. It could have easily gone sour.

You people talk Jobs up like he was the messiah or something, but he was just a businessman that truely, got lucky

Maybe, but he got lucky several times in a row. Perhaps he was just a good businessman, but there don't seem to be too many of them around.
 

What has always surprised me about Jobs is the amount of risk he was willing to take on. People forget what a huge leap it was to ditch everything that came before (including several up-and-coming products) and focus on OSX. The iPhone also represented a huge effort - a radical departure for Apple and radically different from other cell phones, if it hadn't been an immediate success Apple would only be a fraction of what it is today.

History is littered with the wreckage of companies that decided to change direction, diverting resources from existing customers to look for fresh fields. Apple somehow managed to do it several times to great success.

Another thing that strikes me about Apple is how old-fashioned the corporate culture seems to be (from the outside). They do business by figuring out what people want, and then selling it directly to the public with a minimum of fuss at a price that both parties can live with. Contrast this with their competitors in the computer and cell phone markets, who sell pretty much the same devices encumbered with "special offers", "free malware detection (for 30 days)", or annoying contracts, none of which customers actually desire. I can't see why other manufacturers haven't gotten the hint yet.

And you'll find that applets are slow because the Java plugin distributed and maintained by Sun/Oracle doesn't use any kind of preloading as far as I can see. Who knows if Dart is better in this regard, but Java is it's own worst enemy when it comes to startup times. It is a shame, because I like almost everything else about it.

You an not wrong, but are missing the point. Java conceded the desktop to other technologies not because it was an inferior language (I find that even the much-maligned Swing produces very nice UIs) but because it took an age to start, making it unacceptable for any kind of in-browser use.

Oh please,

Java (or more correctly; its user base) has been crying out for some sort of faster startup since the mid 90s. No other problem has done more to keep Java off the desktop that the very slow startup times. If Java applets started as quickly as Flash objects manage to then we would still be seeing Java implemented on major web sites. I could never understand why Java doesn't snapshot and cache a prelinked version of a class the first time it loads, if anything the JVM is getting slower - the demo Java Applets on my website take about as long to start up in 2011 as they did in 2000 but my computer is many times faster.

So Google and Samsung decided they ought to delay their press conference to announce the Galaxy Nexus Prime (or whatever they're calling it) out of respect for Steve Jobs' death

Ummm, I hate to break it to you, but large multinational corporations do not delay the launch of a new product that has been anticipated for months because of sensitivity.

Actually, that is a terrible idea. Consumers know Compaq.

The Microsoft-of-the-90s comparisons are overblown. Microsoft didn't get slapped by the antitrust police for being successful. They got punished (weakly) for a series of dick moves against their competitors and even their own OEM "partners". They used their products' power with consumers to drive deeply unfair deals with the OEMs to prevent other products from even being offered.

The only way that Apple could so something similar would be to prevent retail outlets selling Apple gear from selling any competitor's product. There are pretty strict rules about that sort of thing, and (so far) Apple hasn't broken them.

... and is no more toxic than [...] wearing a gold wedding ring.

I have seen lives ruined this way - be careful out there.

The moral of the story is: if you want you want to keep your data safe, for God's sake don't give it to 1s44c.