Apple fixes macOS High Sierra security flaw

Apple released a security update Wednesday to fix a major bug that allowed anyone to bypass security protocols and act as a computer’s administrator.

“Security is a top priority for every Apple product, and regrettably we stumbled with this release of macOS,” a spokesperson for Apple said in a statement. “When our security engineers became aware of the issue Tuesday afternoon, we immediately began working on an update that closes the security hole.”

The security issue impacted macOS High Sierra 10.13.1. Apple says the update is now available for download and will be rolled out automatically to all systems running the affected software.

On Tuesday, developers noticed that someone with access to a Mac computer running Apple’s most recent Mac software could type “root” and no password in the Users & Groups section of System Preferences and gain administrator-level access to the computer.

That meant a person could download malicious software or otherwise compromise the computer.

Exploiting the bug required physical access to the computer, unless a user had enabled Remote Desktop.

To update your computer, visit the App Store on your Mac and click “Updates” in the toolbar at the top of the window.

BuzzFeed to cut staff as it reorganizes its business side

BuzzFeed announced on Wednesday that it plans to layoff roughly 100 employees.

The cuts will be focused on BuzzFeed’s sales and marketing side in the U.S, with some layoffs hitting staffers in the U.K.’s news and business teams.

“As our strategy evolves, we need to evolve our organization, too – particularly our Business team,” Jonah Peretti, Buzzfeed’s co-founder and CEO, said in an email to staff on Wednesday.

Peretti explained that the business team “was built to support direct sold advertising but will need to bring in different, more diverse expertise to support these new lines of business.”

“Unfortunately, this means we have to say goodbye to some talented colleagues whose work has helped us tremendously,” he said.

BuzzFeed employs about 1,700 people globally. The layoffs were first reported on Wednesday by the Wall Street Journal.

Greg Coleman, BuzzFeed’s president since 2014, will also be transitioning to a new role with the company and will continue to be an adviser.

Snapchat seeks to attract more users by redesigning app

Snapchat is separating what friends share and what media organizations publish in an attempt to appeal to a broader range of users.

Users will now see two separate feeds. Before, the visual-messaging app was mixing posts from friends, publishers, celebrities and others, much the way Twitter, Facebook and other rivals continue to do.

Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel took a jab at rivals, writing that social media “fueled ‘fake news'” because of this content mixing.

“After all, how many times have you shared something you’ve never bothered to read?” Spiegel wrote on Axios.

Snapchat has not been gaining enough users, especially beyond its core of younger people. Instead, rival services have managed to copy Snapchat’s most popular features and make them available to a broader audience. This includes Stories, a way to show photo and video snippets that disappear after 24 hours; Snapchat pioneered it, while Facebook’s Instagram popularized it.

With growth stagnant, parent company Snap’s stock is down sharply since its initial public offering earlier this year. Snap hinted at changes three weeks ago, but didn’t provide details then.

Beyond separating feeds, Snapchat will now order posts using a formula to try to appeal to users’ likes, instead of listing them chronologically. Facebook has long done that; Twitter and Instagram followed more recently.

Facebook pledges $50M a year to match relief donations

Facebook is pledging $50 million a year to match disaster-relief donations, part of a bevy of tools and efforts around charitable causes the social media giant announced on Wednesday.

The pledge isn’t all new money, but represents an effort to formalize matches Facebook has already been making on an ad-hoc basis. For example, it matched user donations up to $1 million for Hurricane Harvey relief earlier this year. The company says it has not yet determined how it will distribute the money.

Facebook also said it will give relief organizations such as the Red Cross access to data on what users need and where they are during a disaster.

While Facebook users can already see individual pleas and offers for help, relief groups will get a broader set of aggregated, organized data similar to what Facebook sees. That includes real-time maps showing where people need help, whether that’s water, shelter or baby supplies.

“Sometimes there are hundreds of thousands of posts and it’s really hard to scroll through all of them,” said Naomi Gleit, Facebook’s vice president of social good.

The company announced the new features during its Social Good Forum in New York, a gathering for nonprofits and individuals using the site to help with various causes.

Uber sinks deeper into trade-secret theft allegations

A top Uber lawyer struggled to explain to a federal judge why the company reached a $7.5 million settlement with a former employee who accused it of stealing its rivals’ trade secrets, even though Uber considered the allegations a bogus attempt at blackmail.

The effort did little to clear up the latest dark cloud hanging over the ride-hailing service. Uber is struggling to defend itself in a high-profile lawsuit alleging that it has been building a fleet of self-driving cars with technology stolen from Waymo, a Google spinoff.

The trial in that case was set to begin next week, but U.S. District Judge William Alsup postponed it until February 5 after learning about a 37-page letter sent to Uber lawyer Angela Padilla by a former Uber security manager and his lawyer. The letter included accusations of intellectual thievery and other shady behavior that have reshaped the Waymo case.

Although the May 5 letter included allegations that Uber had stolen some of Waymo’s trade secrets, Padilla didn’t share it with any of the lawyers involved in the case. That has incensed Alsup, who maintains that the letter is a key piece of evidence, even though its allegations remain unproven.

“On the surface, it looked like you covered this up,” Alsup scolded Padilla. “For reasons that, to me, are somehow inexplicable.”