Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Shane Macaulay and Dino Dai Zovi, a software engineer and security researcher taking part in the brilliantly named "PWN to Own" Hack-a-Mac contest at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, managed to hack into and take control of a MacBook by finding a security exploit that takes advantage of an open Safari browser window. Shane and his teammate Dino won the prize of a brand new MacBook -- presumably loaded with Firefox or some other browser variant -- for managing to find the hole on the second and final day of the contest. The hack wasn't exactly a breeze, since the pair admitted to a total of 9 hours in order to find and exploit the weakness. Apple has patched OS X four times over the last year to fix dozens of security updates, and only regurgitated the corporate line when asked for comment on this particular vulnerability. ("Apple takes security very seriously", well duh!) Even with the recent arousal of interest in Mac OS security, the world has yet to see any kind of exploit released into the wild world web; when / if one does, we'd probably expect the most damaging exploit to use good ol' social engineering rather than a complicated hack like this. Still, Mac users should take some form of satisfaction from knowing that the issue of Mac security is being investigated, rather than being taken for granted.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

The early start on daylight savings time passed last month with little impact, both in terms of the predicted aclockalypse as well as the energy savings it was supposed to generate. However, the shift did have some severe consequences for one Pennsylvania 15-year-old: 12 days in the slammer. The kid made a call in to his school's recorded information line in the early hours of March 11, just a few minutes before the hot line supposedly received a bomb threat. School officials, in their haste to find the caller, matched his cell phone number to a list of callers to the hotline that morning, and immediately pointed the finger at him. His phone correctly recorded the call time as 3:12 am, which was apparently close enough for them to the 3:17 am entry in the system's call logs for the bomb threat. However, the officials hadn't set the clock in their call system properly, meaning the bomb threat came in more than an hour after the kid's innocent call, and it took nearly two weeks of the kid sitting in juvenile detention for somebody to figure it out. The real culprit here is somebody's stupidity -- because even if the time change hadn't occurred, the call times still didn't match up by five minutes.

The story of Michigan's local government proposing the state buy every child an iPod got a little stranger this week. The Raw Feed points us to an article saying that the two state politicians pushing the plan just happened to have taken a trip to California that was, in part, paid for by Apple -- though, no one seems willing to say how much of the bill Apple paid. While in California, Apple execs demonstrated how Apple products, including iPods, could be useful in educational settings, and apparently the presentation was quite convincing. This isn't to say that technology (including iPods) can't be useful for educational purposes -- but it would seem that any plan that includes buying every child in the state an MP3 player (whether or not it's an iPod) should require at least a bit more justification.