Apple ‘computer bug’ could expose pornography details watched by users

A bug in number of Apple computers could expose graphic details of the pornography that had been watched by its owner, it had been claimed.

According to the tech firm Nvidia, a glitch in certain Apple laptops or desktops meant that smut surfers might not be able to cover their tracks by using an "incognito window" in the web browser Google Chrome.

In the normal course, the facility does not store details of the websites a users visit, allowing users to view pornographic sites without leaving a digital trace.

However, according to Nvidia, a bug affecting its graphic cards could mean that a screenshot of the content was stored temporarily and flashed up when a porn-lover was least expecting it.

"This issue is related to memory management in the Apple OS [operating system],'' an Nvidia spokesperson told VentureBeat.

"We have not seen this issue on Windows, where all application-specific data is cleared before memory is released to other applications."

The issue was first emerged when a self-confessed porn watcher was shocked when Google Chrome had apparently stored traces of his sordid sex searches.

''When I launched Diablo III, I didn't expect the pornography I had been looking at hours previously to be splashed on the screen. But that's exactly what replaced the black loading screen,'' the shocked Toronto student Evan Andersen wrote in a blog post earlier this month.

According to Andersen, ''a bug in Nvidia's GPU drivers'', caused the company's graphics processing unit's memory to be retained and assigned to another application running on the computer, which ''allows the contents of one application to leak into another.''

Porn content splashing on the screen when while loading a game might a minor embarrassment, however, according to  Andersen there may be other implications.

''This is a serious problem. It breaks the operating system's user boundaries by allowing non-root users to spy on each other,'' he wrote.

''Additionally, it doesn't need to be specifically exploited to harm users – it can happen purely by accident. Anyone using a shared computer could be exposing anything displayed on their screen to other users of the computer.''