g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Cartago Delenda Est




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Tuesday, November 1, 2005
10:47 - Nice of you to join us

(top) link
Apple was working on this feature in the betas of Tiger, but it didn't make it into the initial release: iChat encryption. And now it's here with 10.4.3.

Presumably the thing they couldn't get working right was the UI. In the Tiger betas, you had to request a .Mac SSL certificate using a button in the .Mac prefs, and then iChat would go authenticate through that. Pretty clunky, if iChat was the only thing the certificate would be good for; but it would have also enabled other encrypted services, though what they might be I'm not sure (Webmail and so on go through normal SSL/TLS).

Well, now apparently they've decided that the flexibility of having the .Mac certificate available for other features isn't that important, and iChat now has certification built right in. The first time you launch it under 10.4.3 you now get this:



Hitting "Continue" with this checkbox enabled transparently requests the .Mac cert, installs it, and registers iChat with it, so you don't even have to know it's going on. And now the preferences have this:



Pretty hard to go wrong with that. Now, both parties have to have a certificate set up before encrypted communications will work, and an iChat user has to do the certificate through .Mac; I believe AIM has encryption already, but it's unclear whether a .Mac cert will interoperate with an AIM one. Seems it would be a pretty dumb feature if it didn't.

Overall, 10.4.3 seems to have its ups and downs. Chris reports that neither of his two pending bugs have been fixed, and they introduced a new "keep waking from sleep for no reason" one in the bargain (I'm testing this one on my home machine now). They also didn't address a few of my bugaboos, like Mail not properly deleting all my old expired Junk/Trash mail from the IMAP server. But they did fix my "Tab key creates four spaces in Mail instead of, you know, a tab" bug—I saw it had been closed as a Duplicate the day after I submitted it, so apparently I'm not the only one it drove up the wall.

This was a huge update, bug-count-wise; I just hope I find a lot more of them fixed that I'm not really aware of already.

(And if SSL certificates are handled this smoothly in iChat, is it too much to ask for Mail to be able to permanently accept my self-signed IMAPS cert so I don't have to dismiss that warning dialog every single time I launch it?)


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