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Photoshop daddy: 'I’m not happy with body image issues it creates for a lot of women'

Plus: 'Superfish megavuln is catastrophic'

QuotW This week we looked up to the stars, scrutinised a spectacular security cock-up and speculated on a quarter century of photo-doctoring. In the process, we ended up with some great quotes.

The biggest story of the week was the discovery of flaws in Superfish, a little-known image analyser Lenovo had slipped into its consumer notebooks.

After a major vuln was spotted, researchers feared that the component could be exploited to harvest personal data. Execs moved quickly to put the public at ease, with Superfish boss Adi Pinhas offering the following:

Despite the false and misleading statements made by some media commentators and bloggers, the Superfish code does not present a security risk.

Security watchdog US-CERT, however, didn't quite agree. It offered its own explanation of the hole:

Exploitation of this vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to read all encrypted web browser traffic (HTTPS), successfully impersonate (spoof) any website, or perform other attacks on the affected system.

And, according to CloudFlare's Filippo Valsorda, the vuln could even be used to validate fake security certificates.

All the users out there with Komodia-powered Parental Control software or adware [can] have their banking connections easily intercepted. Well, good job. It's catastrophic. It's the only way all this mess could have been even worse.

If security holes aren't your thing, we also had Prof Stephen Hawking reflecting on the ultimate fate of man. The superstar physicist warned that man will need to colonise other planets if it is to be spared from self-destruction:

The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression. It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory, or reproduce, but now it threatens to destroy us all.

This week also saw the 25th anniversary of Adobe's iconic Photoshop image editing tool. Developer Thomas Knoll said that over the last quarter of a century, his star creation hadn't always been used to noble ends:

A lot of stuff I’m not really happy with ... especially the body image issues that it creates for a lot of women. I would appreciate it if people back off on that. Another area of major concern on unethical uses of Photoshop is in the news business where you are actually deceiving people.

And finally, we had a bit of shade being thrown between major players in the ever-competitive mobile space. Apple design head Jony Ive, who has made a career out of telling fanbois what they should like, isn't a fan of Motorola's Project Ara. Sir Jony said:

Their value proposition was "Make it whatever you want. You can choose whatever color you want." And I believe that’s abdicating your responsibility as a designer.

This from the guy who couldn't decide between making a $350 watch and a $5,000 watch. ®

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