Sensationalising Apple news
I saw a fine example of the way news is reported today, with a story presented in two very different ways. Here’s the headline and first few sentences from the two stories.
Massive Apple iPad data breach reveals 114,000 subscriber emails
An iPad security breach in the US has revealed 114,000 email addresses of AT&T subscribers, according to the hacking group Goatse Security.
Goatse has previously identified holes in web browsers such as Safari and Firefox, but this is perhaps their biggest profile security hole find to date.
And the second story:
AT&T website scraped to reveal iPad 3G owners’ email addresses
Unfortunately for AT&T’s security infrastructure — and equally unfortunately for customers who bought and activated iPad 3G units on the company’s network — a freelance security research team has reportedly scraped two key tidbits of information from thousands of iPad registrations. As Gawker reports, the hackers exploited a script on AT&T’s site by feeding it ICC-IDs (the GSM SIM card’s identifier code) harvested from iPad user screenshots and interpolated to cover a wider range. The AT&T site obligingly gave back the email address associated with each of the ICC-IDs.
Seeing the first headline certainly got my attention, is there a problem with the iPad? Has Apple screwed up? Then the second followed a few posts down my RSS feed list, calmly stating the facts. Can you tell which site I trust for news?
