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You do have a choice, but it's between an OS with unpatched vulnerabilities and iOS 8. If you care a little about security, you're forced to upgrade. Attackers
by FloppyCopy 12y ago
You do have a choice, but it's between an OS with unpatched vulnerabilities and iOS 8. If you care a little about security, you're forced to upgrade. Attackers don't necessarily need much time to compare the two versions and understand the vulnerabilities that were fixed.
It's not about Apple being evil, it's the nature of computer security today. However they could backport security fixes, if they wanted to leave a period of time where people have a meaningful choice between freshness and stability.
- mhurron 12y agoIt looks like Apple supports IOS releases with the same frequency as OS X, that being n-1. IOS6 probably won't be getting any more patches, but IOS7 should be for the next year or so. So even patching is not forcing anyone.
- FloppyCopy 12y agoAccording to http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222 http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222 the last time version n-1 was updated for a security vulnerability was 6.1.6, and it was updated at the same time as version n. There's no iOS 7.1.3 that would fix any of the many vulnerabilities fixed in iOS 8: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6441 http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6441 , and it's likely there won't ever be. For example, CVE-2014-4377 ("Opening a maliciously crafted PDF file may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution") or any of the WebKit vulnerabilities are a pretty big deal.