[Mailman-Users] Why does iOS's Safari log out the moderator web page?

[Peter Shute]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>  > I don't have access to do that, and I think it's probably 
> too  > difficult for me anyway. I was hoping it was a 
> configuration option  > that I could ask the administrator to 
> try. Maybe I'll just pray  > that iOS 7.1 fixes it.
> 
> Unlikely.  This "feature" is a *fix*.
> 
> The problem is that "convenience" may be defined as "things 
> that do what I want without asking annoying questions."  
> Since "what I want"
> requires mind-reading, which few computers are capable of as 
> yet, most vendors focus on "avoiding annoying questions".  As 
> any martinet with a teaching degree knows, *all* questions 
> are annoying, so don't ask any is the (naive) 
> consumer-friendly policy.
> 
> That policy is what earned Windows its reputation for 
> insecurity (deserved IMHO, YMMV).  Apple is trying to do 
> better (after all, computer viruses were invented basically 
> to screw the Mac -- they have been seriously burned), and so 
> they are taking a conservative approach to getting 
> confirmation from the user that they really are the owner of 
> the device and that they really do want to do whatever it is 
> that some random program off the Internet proposed that they do.
> 
> So iOS 7.1 might be a little bit better, but I wouldn't bet on a lot.

I agree that convenience is often at the expense of security, but I feel that this is just a side efect of something they've done with multitasking. The cookies are supposed to expire if I close the browser, but I haven't. I've only swapped to another program for a while. Safari is a native app, not a random program off the internet.

Sometimes when I come back, the session remains logged in. It might be if I come back quickly. But generally I find it's logged out, so I assume iOS has temporarily closed the browser, causing the cookie to expire.

This happened in iOS6, but nowhere near as much. In iOS7, it seems to happens almost without fail. It's fair enough to expire the cookie if the browser was closed, but they iOS tries to give the impression it wasn't closed by keeping all the tabs open with the content still visible.

As Mark said, this is an Apple problem, not a mailman problem. but if it has become a permanent feature of iOS, and if lots of mailman administrators use iOS, does it become a mailman problem?

Peter Shute