Jackass of the Week: Robert Vamosi

Playing up “security” concerns regarding the iPhone for CNet, Robert Vamosi writes:

For the moment, iPhone will be running a version of the current Mac OS 10.4; in the fall, Apple will presumably upgrade its phones to the newer Mac OS 10.5.

Really? How does he know this? He could be right, but as far as I can tell, there are very few people who know anything specific about the iPhone’s version of OS X, and I highly doubt Vamosi is one of them. And I met a bunch of smart speculators at WWDC last week who think the iPhone takes advantage of Core Animation, which isn’t coming to the Mac until 10.5.

When flaws [in OS X] are patched, Apple does not acknowledge the researchers who actually brought the vulnerability to its attention.

It’s hard to see this as anything other than willful ignorance. It took me 30 seconds to find Apple’s security updates page, open the release notes for the most recent update, and find a credit for outside researchers who reported an issue. In fact, it’s hard to find a security update from Apple that doesn’t give at least one credit to an outside researcher.

★ Tuesday, 19 June 2007