Comment by floatingatoll
4 years ago
The payoff for the very slight risk is an effective built-in malware prevention system that doesn’t treat me abusively and reacts in a timely manner to abusive circumstances.
After decades of production operations, I have no complaints about how this was handled, and I expect they’ll investigate and patch any defects exposed by the outage.
I went for a walk when this happened and when I got back it was fixed. Works for me.
Normally I'm of a similar opinion to yours...but in this case I'm not.
What happens if you're trading securities, or if you have an imminent deadline? Apple sells a fail-closed security feature, without investing the resources necessary to keep it as near to 100% serviceable as possible, and never really discusses it with the user. When it hangs, most users don't even know why.
WTF!
Seems like they could partner with Akamai (or one of its competitors) to make the server-side component of this feature more robust.
If they are going to sell the MBP as a premium professional product, then they must recognize that it will sometimes serve as the linchpin of users' mission-critical activities.
Take a billion dollars out of the stock buyback, invest it in the product instead, and make this problem go away.
Apple’s entire CDN collapsed on Big Sur launch day, which for years was and probably still is backed by Akamai. The OCSP endpoint was just one of many that was impacted. Seems like that’s exactly what you suggest they should have done to make this more robust. The endpoint failed for the first time in a decade this week. That’s better uptime than any stock exchange you’re trading securities on.
What's it like renting a computer?
The tricky part with renting a computer is that you have to insure it against accidental damage by the renter, and that has to be “gig economy” or “business” compatible insurance, because you’re profiting from loaning it to others.
There’s also not exactly a huge market for rental computers when you consider that libraries offer them for free, and often with better Internet connections than those renting a computer could offer.
Renting computers is a lot easier if you host them in the cloud and deny physical access to your customers, though — they generally can’t do permanent damage, and there’s no issues with theft/loss. But this isn’t typically viewed as “renting” anymore, but instead something like “colocation” or whatever EC2 is.
Why do you ask?