MobileMe Security Battle Rages On

by , 2:00 PM EDT, August 22nd, 2008

On Wednesday, Computerworld's Nancy Gohring saw a comment in the MacRumors forum about how MobileMe doesn't encrypt all traffic with SSL and got some outsiders to comment on that general idea. In response, Rich Mogull at Tidbits provided some clarifications that shed better technical light on the whole MobileMe encryption schema. On Friday, Daniel Dilger at Roughly Drafted unloaded on Mr. Mogull in a rough kind of way, and in a related story, John Welch blistered Daniel Dilger's recent story on IPv6. It's been one more day of As The Apple Turns.

The original Computerworld article on Wednesday noted that some users questioned whether all MobileMe traffic is encrypted without going into specifics. Some experts were consulted on the general advisability of encrypted transactions, but the story didn't go into much technical detail that would help the reader assess the situation.

In order to shed some light on that, Rich Mogull at Tidbits provided some good technical background to help readers put the way MobileMe does things into better perspective. He put a sniffer on his network and was unable to decipher any of the MobileMe traffic, putting to rest most concerns.

TMO wrote about and linked to both stories on Thursday

Of course, we're not done yet, and the saga continues. On Friday, Danlei Dilger at Roughly Drafted weighed in on Mr. Mogull's article, complained that Mr. Mogull began his article with unnecessary and arrogant criticisms and went on, in his typical fashion, to go into even more depth on MobileMe security issues.

While Mr. Dilger did add some additional perspective and depth, the personal attacks on Mr. Mogull tended to detract from the long-term technical value of the article.

But wait, there's more. Recently, Mr. Dilger also wrote an article about how Apple is using IPv6 to its own technical advantage in Back to My Mac. In the process, Mr. Dilger got a little bit over his head in some deep networking details, and John Welch in his blog took Mr. Dilger to task.

There are lots of pockets of expertise on the Internet. Sometimes it takes several articles by several people to dig out all the technical details, and the aggregate of all the articles linked to above will do that for those who want to delve into more detail.

In this case, to do that, one needs to take a rocky ride through conflicting personalities and a virtual mini soap opera.