Last year’s CanSecWest Winner Repeats on Vista, Ubuntu Wins (via slashdot)

 Last year’s CanSecWest Winner Repeats on Vista, Ubuntu Wins

DimitryGH followed up on the earlier news that the MacBook Air lost CanSecWest by noting that “Last year’s winner of the CanSecWest hacking contest has won the Vista laptop in this year’s competition. According to the sponsor TippingPoint’s blog, Shane Macaulay used a new 0day exploit against Adobe Flash in order to secure his win. At the end of the day, the only laptop (of OS X, Vista, and Ubuntu) that remained unharmed was the one running Ubuntu. How’s that for fueling religious platform wars?”

Tick in the Box (via Rixstep)

Full Article

(…)
No: what John Lilly is actually ticked off about is something else. As if. John Lilly is watching as his miniscule ‘corporation’ get eclipsed by a more commercial one. One with a reputation for ‘class’. One with an incredible communication channel with their iTunes™ that sits on perhaps several hundred million Windows computers today.

Nothing wrong with Firefox at all – on the contrary. But Moz were hard put to pony up for a $75 K New York Times spread. Moz have perhaps 100 on board; Apple have two hundred times that and are Fortune 500. Moz can possibly make Fortune 500,000.

Apple have an incredible edge over Moz here and John Lilly knows it. He can see his company evaporating away before his very eyes. And just wait until the iPhone takes off – what’s going to happen then?
(…)

Apple Is Loser in Three-Way Hacking Contest (via osnews)

Apple Is Loser in Three-Way Hacking Contest

“An Apple Mac was the first victim in a hacker shoot-out to determine which operating system is the most secure. A former US National Security Agency employee has trousered USD 10000 for breaking into a MacBook Air at CanSecWest security conference’s PWN 2 OWN hacking contest. The MacBook was lined up against Linux and Vista PCs – which have so far remained uncracked. Nobody was able to hack into the systems on the first day of the contest when contestants were only allowed to attack the computers over the network,

Good News.

but yesterday the rules were relaxed so that attackers could direct contest organisers using the computers to do things like visit websites or open email messages. The MacBook was the only system to be hacked by Thursday. Miller didn’t need much time. He quickly directed the contest’s organisers to visit a website that contained his exploit code, which then allowed him to seize control of the computer, as about 20 onlookers cheered him on. He was the first contestant to attempt an attack on any of the systems.”

Bad News.

There is more bad news for Apple: “If you have Apple and compare it to Microsoft, the number of unpatched vulnerabilities are higher at Apple.”

Idem. :(

Ulpianus, D. I, 1, 10 (alterum non laedere)

Ulpianus, D. I, 1, 10

Libro I. Regularum.- Iustitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribuendi.
§ 1.- Iuris praecepta sunt haec: honeste vivere, alterum non laedere, suum cuique tribuere.
§2.- Iurisprudentia est divinarum atque humanarum rerum notitia, iusti atque iniusti scientia.

Vide: “(…) alterum non laedere (…)”

WebKit achieves Acid3 100/100 in public build (via Surfin’ Safari)

Congratulations!!  Great Work!

 

Hugh Laurie – Mystery

Scientists’ Success Or Failure Correlated With Beer (via Slashdot): Updated

(…) an article from the NYTimes that casts a glance at a study done in the Czech Republic (natch) on what divides the successful scientists from the duffers.
“Ever since there have been scientists, there have been those who are wildly successful, publishing one well-received paper after another, and those who are not. And since nearly the same time, there have been scholars arguing over what makes the difference. What is it that turns one scientist into more of a Darwin and another into more of a dud? After years of argument over the roles of factors like genius, sex, and dumb luck, a new study shows that something entirely unexpected and considerably sudsier may be at play in determining the success or failure of scientists — beer.”From the NYTimes’s article:

(…) In spite of his study, Dr. Grim, who said he would on occasion enjoy more than 12 beers in a night, is not on a campaign to decrease beer drinking among scientists. Why not? His answer: “I like it.”

Ha, ha :))

Update via slashdot: Beer-Drinking Scientist Debunks Productivity Correlation.

austinpoet writes in with a blog post debunking the theory we discussed a few days back that scientists’ beer consumption is linearly correlated with the quality of their work. Chris Mack, Gentleman Scientist and beer drinker, has analyzed the paper and found it is severely flawed. From his analysis:
“The discovered linear relationship between beer consumption and scientific output had a correlation coefficient (R-squared) of only about 0.5 — not very high by my standards, though I suspect many biologists would be happy to get one that high in their work… Thus, the entire study came down to only one conclusion: the five worst ornithologists in the Czech Republic drank a lot of beer.”

Safari 3.1, FireFox 3.0b4 And Webkit r.31201

The WebKit r.31201 is preforming really well. Firefox 3.0b4 also – indeed, it seems that the Mozilla Team have improved their Mac OS X version way a lot. Try it and colabore in their beta test program; they deserve it, maybe, for the first time (not talking about Camino). The same can be said about the WebKit Team downloading the latest nightly buid. And, finaly, Apple has released Safari v3.1. Let’s see some results – nothing definitive but still.

Acid Test v.3:

• WebKit r.31201: 93/100
• Firefox 3.0b4: 67/100
• Safari 3.1: 75/100

SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark Results:

• WebKit r.31201: 2.855
• Firefox 3.0b4: 3.637
• Safari 3.1: 3.157

…

UPDATE:

WebKit achieves Acid3 100/100 in public build (via Surfin’ Safari)

Actualización de FinderPop (v.2.1.2)

Turly ha publicado recientemente una nueva actualización de FinderPop. En concreto, la versión 2.1.2. Es comptible con Tiger y Leopard. No dudes en probarla. Cambiará tu ‘experiencia de usuario’ y mejorará la forma en la que usas el ‘interfaz gráfico’ del OS X.