I’m a lot more scared by the implications of Goto Fail than you are; in this area at least, that seems to be exactly what happened: All of iOS 6, and 7.x before 7.0.6, were presumably radically less safe against this sort of attack than iOS 5. (Similarly MacOS 10.9 and 10.9.1.) This was new code (admittedly only one line) which was not just worse and inadequately tested: The code was completely broken and there was no testing at all in a large area of functionality. It wasn’t an obscure government-actor only vulnerability: Anyone trying that kind of attack would receive a pleasant surprise at the first step, skipping a lot of subsequent ones.
through “security through obsolescence.”
It’s not that, more like “new insecurity through innovative deterioration.” I fear that innovative deterioration has started to apply to other areas of Apple as well, but I can say less about that, both because of what I don’t know and what I do.
I see an essential feature as something like “being able to collaborate with others using documents in DOCX format,”
Fair point; I suppose I should be grateful that there was ever any version of Word I was happy to pay for, and with a finite price.
Or, I’d say “manage my personal finances”
My personal finances, or those of anyone with a complicated Quicken data file, do seem to be a special case. None of its competitors (especially MacQuicken) seemed to be serious about data integrity on import. Happy to be corrected on this.