Open Radar

 
22-Jul-2013 04:03 PM Tom Harrington:
Summary:

With the developer center down for 4 days and counting as of today, Apple should make WWDC videos available by other means.

Steps to Reproduce:

As of July 22 2013:

1. Visit https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/videos/ and select a session
2. Click on the "HD", "SD", or "PDF" links for the video

Expected Results:

Apple's developer site would prompt for login information and, if valid credentials were provided, would allow access to the selected material.

Actual Results:

Apple's developer site indicates that authentication has failed because "The application you have selected does not exist."

Regression:

Notes:

Apple's developer center has been down since Thursday July 18, currently four days and several hours. No ETA has been provided. Among other things this prevents access to WWDC videos.

Unlike other aspects of the developer center, this one is immediately fixable. Session videos and PDFs should immediately be made available by other means, which might include one or more of the following:

1. An unrestricted section of Apple's developer site, so that videos could be downloaded without login.

2. The iTunes store. In the past WWDC videos have been distributed this way. Move videos to the store and use iTunes login credentials to validate access.

3. Youtube, Vimeo, or another third-party site. If Apple is unable to provide access using their own infrastructure, make use of one of alternate third party video hosting options.

At least some of these would mean publicly releasing information currently covered by developer non-disclosure agreements. I submit that this should not be a concern at this time because:

a. With the continuing downtime, the lack of access is an increasingly serious barrier to developer productivity, but one that is unrelated to the larger problem of developer center security.

b. All of this information is already effectively public anyway. The entire collection of WWDC videos was recently uploaded to Youtube by an unknown (to me) party. They remained there for several hours before being taken down. The effective change that releasing the videos would cause is insignificant at this time.