SIM card hacker: Bug is either 'a backdoor, gross negligence, or both'

Plus: Michael Gove wants to educate the yoof on how to swap sexting for love poems

QuotW This was the week that Karsten Nohl, the security researcher who found a way to hack into SIM cards with a single text, told El Reg that he was upset that the mobile industry seemed so unconcerned about the vulnerabilities he had reported.

He told El Reg:

We thought our story was one of white-hat hacking preventing criminal activities, but as there is no crime, so no investigation.

Nohl said he was dismayed by the mobile industry's lukewarm response to his revelations - and revealed to us, for the first time, exactly how he did it.

In other news, all that slab-fondling appears to have left behind a generation of clumsy lovers unable to speak the language of love, we heard this week. As if we didn't already know.

Education Secretary Michael Gove took the opportunity to tell Britain that sending nude pictures wasn't the way to the heart of the opposite sex (although many men would probably disagree). So what advice did Mr Lover Lover pass on to us unromantic digital natives? Write love poems, obviously. He recommended courting couples take a look at an app called Love Book, a portable collection of romantic poetry created by his chum Allie Esiri.

Gove said:

It [the Love book app] will allow children to make sense of their own feelings in a way that is more graceful, expressive and beautiful [than sexting].

Technology does not have to mean expression becomes clumsier.

And who knew more about love than Steve Jobs, who strummed the pain of fanbois with his fingers for a whole lifetime? We heard that his house was going to become a shrine for Apple fans who can flock there to think about the legacy of the iGod. But not everyone wants to be like the almighty Steve, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is one of them. When asked if he was the next Jobs, Bezos said:

I think we have our own approaches and vision. Nobody would ever be the next Steve Jobs. He was a unique guy, and, you know... that's not how I think about it. But it's often meant as a compliment and I certainly receive it that way.

Fanbois who are desperate to see Jobs up there in heaven were given the perfect opportunity this week, when Apple Maps began directing people onto the runway of an Alaskan airport. Melissa Osborn, chief of operations at Fairbanks International Airport, said:

We asked them to disable the map for Fairbanks until they could correct it, thinking it would be better to have nothing show up than to take the chance that one more person would do this.

Don't worry, no fanbois were hurt in the making of this article. So far just two cars have made it onto the runway - and both escaped unharmed.

We also witnessed a murder of sorts this week, after finding out that boffins wanted to kill the "leap second" added onto the end of each year to so that clocks accurately reflect the time it takes the Earth to rotate.

Sysadmins are the leap second's most implacable enemies, due to the fact that they have to update their systems every time they see one. Here's what Robert A Nelson, a delegate at the meeting between the International Telecommunications Union and the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, had to say:

If leap seconds are eliminated from UTC, there will be no perceptible impact on social activities and conventions, but there will be significant reduction in the risk to national and international infrastructure and significant cost reduction in their implementation.

Worried about how you're going to afford that next fondleslab? You're in luck, because pretty soon Tesco will release their own value tablet called Hudl. Tesco chief executive Phil Clarke said:

We feel the time is right for Tesco to help widen tablet ownership and bring the fun, convenience and excitement of tablets to even more customers.

Let's hope they don't sport the white-and-blue Tesco Value livery. ®