Hacking

Image Credit: Associated Press

Okay, I get why Randal Ellis of Orange County should be in trouble. At the age of 19, he hacked a 911 phone system and dialed in a phony distress call. To cut a long story short, an armed SWAT team complete with dogs approached the home of Doug Bates. Bates, who was alarmed by the noise picked up a kitchen knife and went to investigate. You can see how this could have gotten very ugly indeed. Bates and his wife were handcuffed until the prank was discovered.

For his part in the pandemonium, Randal Ellis was hit with a $14,765 fine and a three-year jail term. Someone could very well have been killed by what he did, yet you have to ask yourself if he had seriously considered the possible consequences of his actions. Are three years of federal prison really necessary to make him see the error of his ways; especially when one considers how things go for nineteen-year-olds in adult prisons? They clearly decided to throw the book at the young man when he was charged with false imprisonment. For my money, a suspended prison sentence and two thousand hours of community service would have left this kid with some hope of rehabilitation.

Source: The Age

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.

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