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This article is more than 1 year old

Ex-NSA bloke: 'I love Apple products, I just wish they were secure'

Plus: Chocolate Factory is still hanging on to stale pale males

QuoTW The first full week of May saw Uber size up Nokia's map biz, while a Tiversa employee claimed he went rogue and Tesla caught flack for its new home battery pack.

Here are some of the last seven day's choice quotes:

Infosec bod Patrick Wardle laid into Apple for its lame security practices. The former NSA, researcher when asked to describe Sir Jony's darlings, had this to say:

The state of OS X malware is amateur, even basic. It relies on trivially detectable persistence mechanisms and generally relies on infecting users via social engineering tricks such as offering "free [but infected] copies of PhotoShop".

And, before you PC users get too smug, Lenovo has also been catching heat for lax security. Researchers at IOActive took the company to task for crappy practices:

Local and potentially remote attackers can bypass signature validation checks and replace trusted Lenovo applications with malicious applications. These applications will then be run as a privileged user.

The System Update downloads executables from the internet and runs them. Remote attackers who can perform a man in the middle attack (the classic coffee shop attack) can exploit this to swap Lenovo’s executables with a malicious executable.

Over in Blighty, the Met Police have been feeling the, er, burn for an epidemic of computer misuse.

After a Reg report turned up a rash of allegations, the coppers tried to explain it away:

There are a number of cases that are made up of a large number of allegations. For example, in 2014 one case alone was comprised of 53 separate allegations.

Sure.

If coffee is your thing, you'll want to get a load of these words from Keurig chief Brian Kelly, who admitted that putting DRM into your coffeemaker and killing off refillable filters probably wasn't the best of ideas. In his macchiato mea culpa, Kelly said:

We underestimated the passion the consumer had for this. We missed it. We shouldn't have taken it away. We're bringing it back.

This week, Brits were gripped by election fever, hoodwinked by wonky polls and, in some cases, blocked from being able to cast their vote at all over in Hackney.

The London borough was beset with voting problems, and some people were even turned away from polling stations.

But Hackney London Borough Council put a brave face on the matter, saying:

Following media reports about electoral registration problems in Hackney, we know that there has been an issue for some of our voters who used the government's online registration system, where they are not appearing on our printed register.

No? A cockup with the government's website? Shome mishtake, shurely?

And, finally, we leave you with an update on Google's quest to become less of a melanin-deficient sausage party. The ad giant pushed forward VP of "People Operations" Nancy Lee to explain why it hadn't yet hit its diversity goals:

With an organisation of our size, meaningful change will take time. From one year to the next, bit by bit, our progress will inch forward.

Here's hoping your weekend is inching forward as planned. ®

 

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