I'm senior engineer in an Apple shop ATM - if your hardware is crap, the mac will have troubles. Period. This is right up there with turn portfast on for STP routers where Mac's plug in, don't have a .local AD domain, and expect more chatter on your network than a "normal" PC.

I like to point out that the mac equipment is a sensitive little bitch, you'll see the apple kit drop off the network well before pc branded kit - doesn't mean there isn't a problem, just that the mac found it first.

If you found out your local department store was sending your home address through to the local marketing agency you'd be pitching an absolute fit. This is the same. I'm just browsing to a web page, that shouldn't mean that [google/jquery/insertother] should know about it, even if their code is being used on that web page. Just because it's a digital way of gathering the information, doesn't mean it is any less of an intrusion.


And the sysadmin in me feels that constantly polling off to get the latest version of adsense/jquery.js/googleapi is just a waste of bandwidth and resources. Just because you have a 100MB link and 64GB of RAM doesn't mean browsing to a web page or running a program should use it all.

Eh I'm an idiot. Ignore.

Maybe you noticed it this week (or wired did) but the .au version at least has been saying for a very long time now that they don't get PC viruses. It has been a great point of hilarity in my office for quite some time.

The old adage of practice makes perfect would seem to apply - it only makes perfect if you're practicing correctly from the beginning. I ran into a particularly (for me) difficult piece of relativity equation in a text book some time ago, even now when I look at it it makes little sense to me. I was, however, able to go to a lecturer and have them clarify it for me based on how they understood my previous perceptions.

Bring on the robits.

It beggars belief that there wasn't a big red button attached to a console in a control room somewhere that didn't shred RAM and all those components though. Even as far back as 1960 the western world was prepared to suicide pilots in the event of capture, not building that sort of thing in to an unmanned aircraft seems stupid in the extreme.

Any good pentester maintains good physical security (because, you know, you carry your laptop with you at all times), firewalls their own machine, and maintains a fairly decent log of what is crossing their interfaces anyway.

Unfortunately most of the people (I'd go as far as 95-99%) on the backtrack forums are neither pentesters nor good. They use wicd because they don't know how to edit a config file or run their own wpa_supplicant. Most of them go as far as trying to use BT for their regular day-to-day stuff. Idiots. But the backtrack team put up with them, so something like this becomes massive news.

I didn't see headlines when the wget vulnerability was in Backtrack 3...

Based on a few of the indicators in the article, I couldn't say for absolute certainty. The indicator:

- Copies itself into /Library/launched

implies administrative permissions of some level (you can't just write to /Library/ unless the systems permissions are shot to hell. Likewise: /Applications/Automator.app/Contents/MacOS/DockLight should not be writable to a non-authenticated user (indeed, it is NOT writable on my laptop - admin user, but no authentication etc.). The article has a few typo's in it which I originally thought may have accounted for /Library/launched (perhaps they meant ~/Library/launched). Certainly the Microsoft KB on this vulnerability doesn't imply administrative rights granted in a one shot.

That said, any package downloaded that is NOT codesigned can be manipulated to include an install-as-administrator payload in the post install hooks - really once you have local user access it is just a manner of time. True everywhere.

I spend my days working as a mac tech, so no, I really do not. I am, however, still highly amused that it happens this way. In much the same fashion as I am amused when wine is used to exploit a linux box.

Apple exploit found in the wild... targets Microsoft product running on Apple OS.

I like the persistence bit though - use the standard plist files to maintain persistence just like any normal piece of code (like maintaining persistence by running a Windows Service).

Well it actually might - if the system detects that a child has LEFT school early (cutting classes or whatever), you know WHO you are going after that day. And you also know that the child is either alone, or with only one friend, or what not.

I'm totally against this system just for standard surveillance reasons, and it won't be long before kids figure out how to clone or reset their equipment to someone elses, but the first rule of cracking a system is gather as much information as possible - an RFID tag that tells me which kid is currently out of school - gold.

My experience has always been that consumers give a shit about price. The rest is just stuff we geeks fap over.

I actually agree with you on most of those points, so I just wanted to point out the most obvious reason TV vs teacherbot are comparable but still significantly different: The student interacts with the teacherbot, and can have things re-explained to them, questions asked and answered, etc. assuming a good enough teacherbot.

There is actually a well written paper on using this sort of tech to teach chemistry, worth a look in.

There have been (tentative) steps made into "AI"-based teacher bots for students. If there were a decent FOSS AI chat-bot base to work from, the system could be built to work within a certain set of boundaries and teach students from there (I'm more than half convinced Apple's TSPS chat is mostly bots that hand off to a person if they can't answer the question, the same can be applied here).

If you remove the need for a teacher to do a lot of the basics, either the teachers will start to teach properly, or they will find a different profession. There are additional benefits such as repetition, ease of updating a text book, and so on.