Vista

Note: Picture is for conceptual purposes only. This is not the PC from the competition, nor is it a PC actually running Ubuntu. Credit: Wired

Pwn2Own is a great opportunity to line up the latest browser incarnations against some of the world's more competent hackers and see how they perform. This year, there were some unsettling results for Mac owners. While Leopard stood up to all of the Day One challenges, on Day Two, with an easing of the restrictions, browsers were open to attack.

A MacBook Pro with a fully patched Leopard went down in Day Two. It was the first machine to fall and dropped due to a browser vulnerability within Safari. Charlie Miller took the MacBook Pro with an exploit that took a mere two minutes to implement.

While the specifics of the Safari exploit are unknown, we do know from it involved a link which opened a port which allowed Miller telnet access. Miller took the $10,000 prize and the machine. Vista took a little longer, it fell on the fourth hour of Day 2.

Shane MaCaulay, who was part of last year's Mac takedown, had the honor. He was hampered by the release of SP1, which he had not prepared for. Four hours later and a workaround gave him control of the Fujitsu U810 laptop through a previously undisclosed Flash vulnerability.

Most notable is the fact that after three days, Ubuntu was left standing. Day Three really opened up the restrictions allowing access through third party applications, regardless of this fact; no one was able to takedown Ubuntu. Is Ubuntu invulnerable? Hardly, I think this has more to do with OSX and Vista being bigger trophies. According to MacAuley, with a few hours tweaking his exploit would work on Linux and OSX.

I finally bit the bullet and installed Windows Vista SP1 on my system.  The thing that put me off most about it was the size.  Updates of that size tend to take a long, long time to install.  I was dead right.  Microsoft were not lying with the disclaimer that it might take over one hour to install.  It took over two hours and possibly more than three.  It was as slow and syrupy as some sticky molasses.  The thing was that I actually had a lot of work to do, which made things decidedly inconvenient.

I have a 100MBPS FTTH Internet connection, the 700+ MB of x64 SP1 screamed home in about three minutes.  I was impressed, as I am assuming that there would have been a lot of people downloading it at the same time as I did.  I actually had the upgrade on my system about a month and a half ago.  I didn't install it and somewhere along the way it disappeared.  It did not appear again in automatic updates, so I opted to download it from the downloads page at Microsoft.

Link for the 64-bit version:

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Five Language Standalone for x64-based Systems (KB936330)

Link for the 32-Bit version:

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Five Language Standalone (KB936330)

While the update process was remarkably slow, it can be installed unattended.  Rather than install when you need to use your computer, you would do better to set it up to run overnight.

Windows Vista SP1 has finally touched down and is officially available for download. It will be pushing mediocre broadband connections to the absolute limit as it is a heavy beast. There is a swathe of security updates and hotfixes in the mix which ways in at 434.5MB for the 32Bit version 726.5MB for the 64-bit version. Those that are unlucky enough to live in countries with bandwidth restrictions are likely to feel a bit of a sting.

The big question on the minds of many people is will this thing work with a cracked version of Windows Vista? There is some bad news there, I am afraid. If you made use of the popular Paradox crack then your product will be deactivated. Word on the street is that you won't be forced into reduced access mode, you will still be able to run your system, albeit with annoying pop-ups that you will need to work around (rumor has it there is a workaround for this). If you are using Vista Loader, it does appear that your system will still work, for the time being at least. Vista Loader is the only major crack that escaped the net. Just do a file search on your primary hard disk for: "Vista Loader" in order to find out if you should download Vista SP1.

If you are running a legitimate system then this should be good news. We are expecting to see a performance boost and better multi-core support. If you are running a quad-core processor, my guess is that now it will start to show its real benefits. There are said to be some major improvements with this release, let's hope so. I like Vista, but it does have a ways to go before it is a complete operating system.

If you are a Crysis player running GeForce then grab the latest drivers, they are currently in Beta. The older drivers are geared towards the original Vista and according to Extreme Tech, will actually cause a performance decrease at higher graphics settings. The new drivers will give you a slight increase, but nothing to write home about.

Source: Slashgear, Extreme Tech