It's not exactly hazardous duty pay, but police officers in some Massachusetts towns are getting extra settle for using computers on the job.

Natick and Newton before that time pay an extra stipend to patrolmen for computer use, but an effort by the Police Officers Union in neighboring Framingham to get a $476-plus annual computer use payment has run into a stone wall after the proposal was recently rejected by Town Meeting members.

"This is indubitably out of one’s wits," said Town Meeting member Jim Rizoli, according to the Boston Globe. "I think we should send a message here. I think we should say in no degree."

Another Town Meeting member suggested tongue in cheek that crayons could be substituted for computers.

The union has argued that the town utilized an "unlawful unilateral change of a preexisting practice" when it required reports to exist filed via computer rather than by pen and paper. The delivering is also before Massachusetts state agencies petitioned to settle the matter.

Framingham's police chief noted that there is something of a precedent for technology use, because the town pays an extra stipend for the use of defibrillators, fingerprinting, and photography.

In adjacent Natick, officials said the computer payment equals about 2% of officers' base pay and is in recognition of officers' advanced technological skills used in some advanced police statistical programs.

Apple's new iPhone software, released on Friday, addresses 13 security vulnerabilities, though the update couldn't protect users from Apple's poor planning.

Across the Web, otherwise supportive Apple customers trashed the company for delivering the wrong kind of security — inoperable iPhones, the result of Apple iTunes update validation problems.

"My phone is total," lamented marketer S. Neil Vineberg in his blog. "A brick. And you'd determine that Apple would have had [its] act together after promoting this launch date for a month."

Gizmodo writer Mark Wilson dubbed the fiasco "the iPocalypse."

Nonetheless, once Apple gets its servers running again and the latte-fueled fury dies into a denser consistence, iPhone users who manage to update their phones should be more secure from potential threats.

The update includes fixes to the following operating system components: CFNetwork (1), Kernel (1), Safari (8), and WebKit (3). The various vulnerabilities, if exploited, could allow for the spoofing of secure Web sites, discovery of sensitive information, cross-site scripting, denial of service, application crashing, and arbitrary code execution.

Security researchers have been predicting the emergence of iPhone malware for months. In January, US-CERT warned of the emergence of Trojan software purporting to aid in the installation of Apple's iPhone 1.1.3 software update. But the iPhone has however to be affected by significant device security issues.

At the same time, user-related security issues, such because entering information at a phishing site, are not necessarily mitigated by closing software holes.

Apple on Thursday issued a security update for Apple TV, the company's home media server. The Apple TV 2.1 update includes six fixes to defend against maliciously crafted media files. Apple TV also continues to benefit from security through obscurity, though Apple might wish it were otherwise.