Friday, April 10, 2015

Google let root certificate for Gmail expire, causing e-mail hiccups

Sorry I've been quiet this week. IFFBoston is coming up and I've been helping with their internal website. I finally have a project to play with some python code.

I've fallen behind on my Internet reading and there's taxes to do and Apple updates to install. But I wanted to comment on this story that Ars Technica reported last Monday, Google let root certificate for Gmail expire, causing e-mail hiccups "On Saturday morning, one of Google's root certificates expired, causing millions of users' mail clients to suddenly protest. The certificate for Google's intermediate certificate authority (Google Internet Authority G2) was used to issue Gmail's certificate for SMTP, and the expiration at 11:55am EDT caused many e-mail clients to stop receiving Gmail messages. While the problem affected most Gmail users using PC and mobile mail clients, Web access to Gmail was unaffected."

Seriously? People are supposed to keep their Internet passwords up-to-date and their software patched and deal with a new two-factor authentication system every six months (the new 1Password now has support for it) and Google, the company that wants to make all the world's information accessible and that has email and calendaring products used by millions, can't set a reminder that their certificate is expiring? That's pathetic.

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