Promises to pull its socks up

The fruity cargo cult Apple has admitted that the bugs that have been plaguing its software of late are due to a flaw in its software development process.

The last few months have seen increasingly stupid flaws cropping up in Apple’s software ranging from clocks which cannot tell the time to yesterday’s bug which allowed anyone access to an Apple Mac.

Apple said it would review its software development process which clearly has been suffering from basic security testing and a decent Q&A.

Apple said it released a patch to fix the bug yesterday morning and it would be automatically installed on vulnerable machines later in the day.

“We greatly regret this error and we apologize to all Mac users”, Apple said in a statement. “Our customers deserve better. We are auditing our development processes to help prevent this from happening again.”

The US and German governments issued alerts advising Mac users to install the patch.

There is a slight problem with the spin that Apple is putting on this particular bug. Apple said its security engineers learned of the problem on Tuesday afternoon and posted the patch within 24 hours.

However, the bug has been known about on Apple boards for at least two weeks. Perhaps Apple is saying that one side of the company knew about the bug but no-one thought to tell security?

“Security is a top priority for every Apple product, and regrettably we stumbled with this release of Mac OS”, Apple said in its statement.

So that is ok then. Still it is nice that we can finally see one of those rare moments where Apple is admitting it cocked-up. It is so rare and fortuitous that I must remember to buy a lottery ticket today.