Whether you use Google Chrome's Incognito Mode for fun or pleasure, you should know that your privacy is less than 100 percent safe because of a nasty little bug hiding inside your OS.
A report shows that users are at a high risk of having their former video content unveiled just out of the blue.
Evan Andersen, an engineering student at the University of Toronto, was the first to raise the alarm about the existence of a bug, which he first thought affected Nvidia GPUs, causing the visual content that users previously watched getting impromptu screen-time.
As Andersen launched Diablo III, the splash screen promptly displayed pornographic content that he watched several hours earlier. He even took screenshots that he aptly censored to make them safe for work.
It was lucky for Andersen that he was the sole user of the Mac computer at the moment of the mishap. An important thing to remember is that the bug can pop up any visual content that was on your screen before, going well beyond Google Chrome's Incognito indiscretion.
Initially, Andersen pointed fingers at Nvidia's GPU drivers as the culprit.
"GPU memory is not erased before giving it to an application. This allows the contents of one application to leak into another," Andersen notes on his personal blog.
But Reddit users who looked into the matter underlined that the problem appears in GPUs manufactured by AMD, as well. This leads to the conclusion that the problem resides within the way Apple OS handles visual memory, and not the video card drivers.
"This issue is related to memory management in the Apple OS, not NVIDIA graphics drivers," said a spokesperson for Nvidia.
The graphics card manufacturer adds that the problem is not present in Windows, as Microsoft's operating system clears app-specific data before the memory is released and allocated to a different application.
As the engineering student points out, the bug is to be taken seriously because "non-root users [can] spy on each other," something that nobody who treasures trust would not want to do.
Andersen asked both Nvidia and Google to offer a fix for the issue, but none of the two companies seem to find time for it. Apple might be the next in line, but the Cupertino-based company already has a list of problems with OS X El Capitan that require attention.
