AppleInsider reported on how Apple’s double digit growth contradicts estimates by IDC and Gartner that Mac sales fell.

Earlier this month, IDC (above) reported that Apple’s U.S. Mac unit sales in Q2 (Apple’s fiscal Q3, the quarter ending in June) fell by 1.7 percent, while Gartner (below) reported a drop in Mac unit sales of 1.3 percent.

Globally, Apple reported that Mac sales jumped from 3.75 million to 4.41 million year-over-year for its fiscal Q3, a unit increase of 18 percent and a new June quarter record.

18 percent increase is a big difference compared to a drop of 1.7 percent.

Shocking? Not if you’re aware of how these analysts portray data:

IDC, Gartner and Strategy Analytics have a long history of presenting carefully contrived data in press releases clearly designed to flatter their clients and denigrate their clients’ competitors, with Apple being a common target.

In addition to excluding iPads from their PC sales (while counting Windows tablets and including every other new form of PC device), IDC has also (like Strategy Analytics) radically revised its tablet figures after the fact, inventing, for example, Samsung tablet shipments that retroactively disappeared in the next year’s figures.

At the same time, IDC inflated its year ago estimates of the number of tablets attributed to unnamed “other” vendors by nearly ten million units, creating unflattering market share numbers for Apple in 2012, followed by unflattering market share growth figures for Apple in 2013, all coaxed from shifting numbers presented without any verifiable source. Apart from Apple, no other significant tablet vendor reports its unit sales.

IDC has also obscured the reality of Apple’s iPad sales by comparing them to kids tablets and toys, in order to water down Apple’s “market share” and imply that iPads are falling out of fashion—while distracting all attention away from the fact that nobody is selling premium tablets in volumes like Apple with margins like Apple.

Earlier this year, IDC was found to have added Windows 8.1 “2 in 1” PC notebooks into its reports of tablet shipments, another effort to portray Apple’s “share” of the “market” as diminishing, and a direct reversal of IDC’s staunch policy of not counting iPads as PCs, ostensibly because they are completely different product categories with no perceivable market impact on each other.

A former IDC researcher spoke to Fortune:

So, the mantra became, preserve the growth rates; to hell with the actual numbers. Even the growth rates are fiction. The fudge is in the “others” category, which is used as a plug to make the numbers work out. In fairness, we did do survey work, calling around, and attending white box conferences and venues to try to get a feel for that market, but in the end, the process was political. I used to tell customers which parts of the data they could trust, essentially the major vendors by form factor and region. The rest was garbage.

Microsoft made a statement regarding its filing of legal action against Samsung.

We don’t take lightly filing a legal action, especially against a company with which we’ve enjoyed a long and productive partnership. Unfortunately, even partners sometimes disagree. After spending months trying to resolve our disagreement, Samsung has made clear in a series of letters and discussions that we have a fundamental disagreement as to the meaning of our contract.

Samsung and Microsoft are both large and sophisticated companies. In 2011, after months of painstaking negotiation, Samsung voluntarily entered into a legally binding contract with Microsoft to cross-license IP – an agreement which has been extremely beneficial for both parties. Samsung had been complying with the contract and paying to use Microsoft’s IP.

So what changed? Since Samsung entered into the agreement, its smartphone sales have quadrupled and it is now the leading worldwide player in the smartphone market. Consider this: when Samsung entered into the agreement in 2011, it shipped 82 million Android smartphones. Just three years later, it shipped 314 million Android smartphones. [Source: IDC, WW Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker – 2014 Q1, Published: May 2014] Samsung predicted it would be successful, but no one imagined their Android smartphone sales would increase this much.

After becoming the leading player in the worldwide smartphone market, Samsung decided late last year to stop complying with its agreement with Microsoft.

How much is at stake? Microsoft reportedly makes $2 billion from Android patents.

AppleInsider reported on a new Android flaw that allows malware to gain extensive control over a user’s device.

This is particularly serious because Google has granted a variety of trusted apps in Android broad permissions; by pretending to be one of these trusted apps, malware can can fool users into thinking that they are installing an app that doesn’t need any special permissions, then trick the system into giving it essentially full control of the device, with access to the user’s financial data, contacts and other private information, even data stored in the cloud.

Here are some possible apps for malwares to spoof.

Adobe Flash:

While Google eventually gave up on Flash for Android, an Adobe Flash plugin privilege escalation flaw remained embedded in Android’s webview—the browser component that gets embedded into third party apps that present web content—until the release of Android 4.4 KitKat last fall.

With Flash so deeply integrated into Android’s webview component, any malware using Fake ID to pretend to be Flash can subsequently escape Android’s app sandbox and take control of other apps, including Salesforce and Microsoft OneDrive, grab data from those apps, sniff out all those apps’ network traffic and gain any additional privileges held by those apps.

The solution is simple: upgrade to Android 4.4 KitKat. However, not every Android user can upgrade even if they want to.

NFC:

Using Fake ID, a malware app that asks the user for no special permissions at installation can subsequently pretend to be the Google Wallet app; Android will then provide the rogue app with all the permissions it gave its own NFC infrastructure, which includes users’ financial data.

Because Wallet, 3LM and other apps do not depend on the Flash / Android webview flaw, these other vectors of attack weren’t fixed in KitKat. That means Fake ID affects all versions of Android, including the latest Android 4.4.4 and the upcoming “Android L” (aka Android 5.0 beta).

This happens because Android apps are signed but not verified, unlike iOS apps.

However, Bluebox discovered that “the Android package installer makes no attempt to verify the authenticity of a certificate chain; in other words, an identity can claim to be issued by another identity, and the Android cryptographic code will not verify the claim (normally done by verifying the issuer signature of the child certificate against the public certificate of the issuer).

“For example, an attacker can create a new digital identity certificate, forge a claim that the identity certificate was issued by Adobe Systems, and sign an application with a certificate chain that contains a malicious identity certificate and the Adobe Systems certificate.

“Upon installation, the Android package installer will not verify the claim of the malicious identity certificate, and create a package signature that contains the both certificates. This, in turn, tricks the certificate-checking code in the webview plugin manager (who explicitly checks the chain for the Adobe certificate) and allows the application to be granted the special webview plugin privilege given to Adobe Systems – leading to a sandbox escape and insertion of malicious code, in the form of a webview plugin, into other applications.”

It is hard for you to know if you have been infected.

On the other hand, Fake ID requires no user involvement, and can be used by malware posing as an innocent app or game that requests no special permissions. Once installed, the app can take over without the user having any knowledge of being infected.

This underlines the shocking state of Android security.

“The Android malware ecosystem is beginning to resemble to that which surrounds Windows,” the firm observed. By September, Duo Security stated that “more than half of Android devices are vulnerable to at least one of the known Android security flaws.”

9to5Mac reported that Facebook will be disabling messaging in its main iOS app this week. Users will have to download its Messenger app.

This might be a good thing for those of us who are trying to spend less time on Facebook. Personally, I tend to get distracted by Facebook when I have to go into Facebook to reply messages. I have cut down distraction a lot ever since I started using the standalone Facebook Messenger app.

It will be interesting to see what Facebook plans to do with a two messaging apps in Messenger and Whatsapp.

The Verge spoke to more than 100 Comcast employees.

One common theme was the importance of retaining customers.

We locked down the ability for most customer service reps to disconnect accounts. We queue the calls for customers looking to disconnect to a retention team who are authorized to give more deeply discounted products to keep subscribers.

Upgrade the customer where possible.

The pay was great and everything else about the job was a nightmare. I remember when a 90-year-old woman called to add phone to her account and my boss told me afterwards, “She was probably senile… but you should have upgraded her cable. I don’t think you are going to be sitting in this seat for very long.”

Sales is more important than customer service.

I would be frustrated because I would tell them we need customer service training as much as sales training, but it came from Philly [Comcast’s headquarters] so that’s what we had to deal with. [Managers] would listen to the call, even have secret shoppers call in. If we didn’t ask [customers] to get more products we would be spoken to. Eventually, selling became part of tech support and billing.

John Gruber wrote about Xiaomi blatantly stealing copyrighted photos taken with DSLRs and passing them off as photos from its phone cameras.

They have updated the page to remove the photos after their theft has been exposed. Here’s a link to a screenshot of the original page.