David Murphy at PCmag. com made a pleasant catch today by noting Apple posted two job opportunities on Thursday for managers of "New Product Security. " Maybe it is a coincidence that the positions opened up when they do, but the job descriptions certainly sound like a reaction to Apple's troubles of late for losing test gadgets.
"The candidate will result in overseeing the protection of, and managing risks to, Apple's unreleased items and related intellectual property, " said the post.
Apple representatives didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Thursday, the CNET report pushed the bounds of believability for many. An iPhone was taken into a San Francisco tequila club in July by an unidentified Apple employee who somehow lost control from the device. The circumstances were strangely similar to an event in April 2010, when another Apple employee lost an apple iphone 4 prototype in a Bay Area beer garden.
Could this really occur to Apple again?
San Francisco Police confirmed on Friday they assisted an Apple security team to search a home within the city's Bernal Heights neighborhood where Apple had electronically tracked the telephone. The device wasn't found there.
While it was simple to draw parallels between those two events, there were additional signs that Apple's problems went beyond iPhones. Colleague Josh Lowensohn reported a week ago that Apple is trying to retrieve a prototype laptop that's in the possession of Carl Frega, a North Carolina resident who said he acquired the unreleased device using a Craigslist ad. He bought the machine thinking it was only great for spare parts.
On the same day that Apple posted the task openings, an Apple store customer was given internal company media and documents accidentally after taking his computer in for service in Stamford, Conn. Cult of Mac was contacted by a man who said he was given a hard drive and a computer that was being repaired with the spare drive containing a backup from the store's internal file server.
This is significant because this really is Apple, a company that has forged quite a reputation through the years for secret keeping and message managing. Apple execs prefer to spring new devices to great fanfare at very rehearsed as well as controlled press events. Lots of people have commented previously week that they suspect the misplaced gadgets is thanks to some type of Apple publicity stunt.
But the job postings last week seem to indicate that an even more plausible reason for the lost devices may be small less conspiratorial. Apple's security seems to have slipped a little and the company is trying to correct the issue.
