Month of Apple Bugs

An old friend is posting runtime fixes for the bugs of the Month of Apple Bugs.

Protect yourself. Hopefully Apple will have improved their response time to these sorts of issues, and hopefully the user community will not try to blow smoke at people about real problems.

Update: Some people have asked for my thoughts on response time to these sorts of issues after my own experience interacting with Apple’s product security team.

My experience was over 3 years ago now and presumably Apple has improved from that and similar experiences with others in that time. Three years is an eternity in the software industry, even in large organizations with a lot of inertia. My experience way back then was struggling to get any verifiable confirmation that they were working on the problem.

It was a frustrating experience; trying to overcome any situation of mutual distrust is very difficult. While it is understandable that it takes a while to develop and test changes, that can’t be used as a blanket excuse to keep the people reporting issues in the dark about progress on them.

On the other hand, it sounds like the Month of Apple Bugs folks are giving no advance notice at all to Apple and the open source project VLC. It is impolite of them, even supposing that one or both were notoriously reticent about releasing fixes. I don’t think their actions rise to the level being negligent under current social standards, but then, there’s no law against being a jerk.