AskDeveloper Podcast - 50 - Content Distribution

- Follow up on Encryption episode (Google blocking Symantec certs) ○ Sep 2015 incident (Thawte issuing a goolge.com cert without authorization. Attributed to employee error and resolved by termination § Oct 2015 Symantec disclosed 23 test certs issued without owners knowledge, more certs uncovered by Certificate Transparency logs, symantec extended the audit and found additional 164 certs, and 2458 certs issued for domains never registered https://security.googleblog.com/2015/10/sustaining-digital-certificate-security.html § Jan 19 2017, Mozilla reported more misuse https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/fyJ3EK2YOP8/yvjS5leYCAAJ § Mar 23, 2017, google posts a report of 30,000 bad certs from symantec, proposing a gradual plan to distrust symantec till actions taken to ensure trust https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/eUAKwjihhBs%5B1-25%5D Extended validation vs. Domain validation certs (mostly technically identical -EV may use stronger enc- but different registration process with different UX presented by browsers -green bar-) • How the Television age reflected a scarcity of communication channels. • How the Internet created an abundance of communication channels. • Creators and audience choose platforms based on cost, ease of use and unified user experience, not because “that’s where everybody is”. • Once made a choice, users don’t switch to another similar platform even if it’s marginally better. • Vimeo vs YouTube. Google+ vs Facebook. • Control of personal data or openness isn’t a deciding factor for most users. • User data and attention is the main product for content distributors. • The software offered by content distributors is fairly simple. • Most of the engineering effort of these companies is going in scaling for a billion users and into mining the data provided by those users. • The main components of content distribution: • Producing content • Serving content • Consuming content • Rating • Comments and discussion • Reviewing • Discovery, subscription, and notification • Saving, bookmarking, and organizing Ads