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Apple Security Chief Steps Down After iPhone Gaffe
Trailrunner7 writes "Apple's vice president of global security has reportedly stepped down, roughly two months after the surfacing of news reports that an iPhone prototype had gone missing for the second time in less than two years. John Theriault, who came to Apple from Pfizer and was a former FBI agent, has retired in the wake of controversy regarding the device's disappearance and the subsequent efforts to track it down. Apple did not return a request for comment. Nevertheless, Theriault's departure follows a public relations dustup that began when an Apple employee left the prototype at a bar in San Francisco."
he should have used Find my iPhone.
The better question might be "what less could he have done"?
The 'controversy' over the handling of the lost iPhone includes the bit where Apple security flacks allegedly impersonated police officers in order to conduct an illicit search of somebody's house...
For a company of Apple's stature, with extensive offshore manufacturing and significant interest from both highly-visible tech-rumor-bloggers and 3rd party accessory makers who want to have their tooling done before the competition, the leak level is pretty good. Getting the company embroiled in a potentially messy criminal case, though, is one of those 'career limiting' moves...
The issue is not so much that a prototype was lost, but how they handled the retrieval efforts, passing themselves off as police, making immigration threats...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Arguably, if Apple wanted the investigation to have been conducted in accordance with US law, they wouldn't have hired an FBI agent...
This may have more to do with the second 'lost' iPhone which was handled very poorly by all reports.
You don't impersonate police officers, by omission or commission. You don't pretend it is an episode of CSI or a rerun of 'Enemy of the State". Apple has never been forthcoming about what happened (if anything). Sounds like a screw up from the folks running the show.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This is how you end up with really shitty phones.
The whole iPhone 4 antenna issue came about because Apple required employees to use cases during field testing, after all.
As far as putting the devices on a leash is concerned, maybe the employees who lost them didn't want to pay for tethering.
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography
"Kudos to him for taking responsibility"
How said he is taking responsibility (in the sense of "yes, it's my fault")?
There are two kinds of responsibility-related resignations:
1) As a way to say "I failed, I don't deserve this position".
2) As a way to say "I tried to do my job but the higher ups don't allow me to do it properly: I won't continue under these circumnstances".
No where in the article nor the links there's indication about what's the case here.
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