Is it a conspiracy, or just a bug in the app store? Nobody knows.
Well no, people do know. It's not a bug because it's clearly intentional. It's not a conspiracy because that's just vagueposting.
Some iPhone Apps Receive Mysterious Update 'From Apple'
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Re: Some iPhone Apps Receive Mysterious Update 'From Apple'
#32If Apple is distributing modified vlc binaries without releasing the source of the changes when requested, is that a potential legal problem?
As always, it depends; VLC "the iOS app" is not the same as VLC "the binary compiled from source". The article itself says they couldn't find any code changes, and the theories are that a certificate was updated. I don't believe an iOS distribution specific certificate falls under the license you're referring to, but I'm no expert on these matters.
As a developer of the VLC-iOS app, I can confirm that the binary itself is completely unchanged. It is indeed the signature that was updated.
Re: Some iPhone Apps Receive Mysterious Update 'From Apple'
#33Has anyone ever done a proper security audit of VLC that is downloaded from the web? I don't trust it, and the fact that their releases on Github don't include binaries makes me trust it even less. Nobody is compiling VLC from source, and they don't provide any sort of provenance from the GH actions pipeline.
You can find all binaries, including the one for iOS and Android, on our website, signed by the core developers. If you trust us, it is totally up to you. GitHub is used as a mirror only as we run our own infrastructure so quite obviously we are not using the GitHub release process.
Re: Some iPhone Apps Receive Mysterious Update 'From Apple'
#34hmm, my money is on some actively used 0-day exploit that Apple is sealing shut before the CVE gets announced. By the looks of the app list, they seem to be apps and games that used to be popular and have fallen in disrepair and apps that are starved of maintenance attention. On the one hand it could be an exceptionally good example of "stewardship"; on the other hand, if this is true, what if authorities could later…
> my money is on some actively used 0-day exploit that Apple is sealing shut
Why not an introduction of a new exploit ? This could be handy in those uncertain times.
Re: Some iPhone Apps Receive Mysterious Update 'From Apple'
#35[dead]