VideoLAN @videolan App Stores were a mistake. Currently, we cannot update VLC on Windows Store, and we cannot update VLC on Android Play Store, without reducing security or dropping a lot of users… For now, iOS App Store still allows us to ship for iOS9, but until when?
Basically, modern app stores have changed how they work and now require the signing keys, VLC feel this is a bad thing and refuse to update. Banks are okay with it, but VLC feel more strongly than banks.
Banks are okay with it, but VLC feel more strongly than banks.
I mean banks are known for horrible security practices all around so that makes perfect sense.
Darren Kitchen from Hak5 has an amusing story about a bank teller who assured him email was entirely fine to send sPII through. “No sir, you just need to send it to us, and once we have your information then it’ll be secure.” No encryption. So, yes.
Also look into the Equifax security breach. Un-patched software for months.
It makes almost no sense to have a password length limit. 1_000_000, that’s One Million, characters is equal to 1MiB. That’s twice the length of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and much less than most modern webpages. After hashing, which is how passwords should be stored, text length is irrelevant. All hashed inputs come out the exact same length. 65 characters for SHA256.
Very much known for their horrible security practices, yes. Absolutely.
Absolutely. They are entrenched in their regulations so much that it takes forever to change things.
Years ago, I had an account at an american big4 bank with an 8 character password and was going through and making all my passwords unique. I was changing everything to random strings of 20-30 characters (this isnt the best practice, btw, but still better than 8chars), so when I get to this bank account it capped me at 15chars. I couldnt believe the forced low entropy they gave me for something as vital as a bank account.
I asked them why, and basically they said their system would break with anything over 15chars.
Who do you think makes the decisions for a bank?
The person writing the Android app?
Or the person who just wants customers to be able to access the app and use the services?
Isn’t that how fdroid worked for a long time?
Edit: although it doesn’t make sense to me for play store to do the same without the source code available
Edit 2:
The reason is that they forced new apps AND apps for Android TV to use App Bundles https://developer.android.com/guide/app-bundle This type of release cannot be installed as it but can be used to generate the apk files. In order to do so, the Play Store has to sign on the fly.
Not buying it. They could let the dev sign evey combination before uploading. They’ll be caching them anyways
Traditionally Fdroid signs every app. Not with the developers key. The future are reproducible builds. https://f-droid.org/2023/01/15/towards-a-reproducible-fdroid.html this is a futuristic app store, not what google has.
