Apparently, Steve Wozniak has some reservations about Apple’s security methods.

The Apple co-founder has claimed that an Apple employee was fired after showing Wozniak an iPad hours before the device was rolled out to the public earlier this month, according to Gizmodo.

“I can tell you that the test engineer who showed me an iPad after midnight, for (two) minutes, during the iPad launch was indeed fired,” Wozniak wrote to the blog.

Wozniak said he did not learn that the “test engineer” was fired until later and he speculated in his e-mail that he thinks the engineer wasn’t supposed to show anyone an iPad 3G version or that he showed the device before he was allowed. “And I’m an Apple employee who he was showing it to,” Wozniak wrote.

“In my opinion, Apple was not hurt by my being shown this iPad,” Wozniak wrote. “I did describe this to Steve Jobs the night of the iPad introduction and he said ’so it’s no big deal.’”

The employee still got fired, Wozniak said. He took note that the Apple engineer who showed him the iPad is unemployed but Gray Powell, the Apple engineer who lost what is believed to be a prototype of the iPhone 4G, still has his job. Powell inadvertently touched off a media blitz by losing the experimental handset in a San Francisco Bay Area bar last month. The person who found the phone sold the device to Gizmodo for $5,000. On Friday, CNET reported thatpolice are looking into the matter.

“What am I missing here? ” Wozniak wrote. “Product secrecy is good for Apple and should be strictly enforced, but maybe 10 percent of niceness and 90 percent of strictness is OK too.”

It’s safe to say that Wozniak feels a kinship with Apple’s engineers. Gizmodo published its e-mail correspondence with Wozniak after CNET published photos of Wozniak dressed in a T-shirt that read: “I went drinking with Gray Powell and all I got was a lousy iPhone prototype.”

In an e-mail to CNET, the 59-year-old Wozniak said of Powell: “It seems clear that (Powell) kept the iPhone prototype secret enough to satisfy Apple. It’s a bad accident that could happen to any of us.”

Wozniak’s attempts to come to the aid of Apple engineers is likely to only boost his already prodigious popularity in Silicon Valley and with hardcore techies. The creator of the Apple I and Apple II computers, Wozniak is considered one of the founding fathers of personal computing.

Scammers are distributing e-mails designed to trick iPad owners into downloading software that they think is an iTunes update, but which turns out to be malware that opens a back door on the computer, researchers warned on Monday.

The e-mails have a subject line that says “iPad Software Update” and offer a link to a Web page that looks like a legitimate iTunes download page, according to BitDefender. Instead, the link installs malware identified as Backdoor.Bifrose.AADY, according to the BitDefender blog.

The malware injects itself in to the “explorer.exe” process and opens up a back door that attackers can use to take control of the system whenever they want, the post said. It also attempts to read the keys and serial numbers of the various software programs installed on the computer and logs passwords to the victim’s ICQ, Messenger, and POP3 mail accounts, and protected storage, BitDefender said.

Mac users are not affected by this piece of malware, according to the post.