MacBook WiFi Exploit Finally Published

Remember last year's brouhaha (or was it ballyhoo) about the MacBook wireless exploit reported by the Washington Post's Brian Krebs?

Well, David Maynor finally published the details of his original MacBook hack. I have to say, I was always very skeptical of Maynor's whole story, starting with the problems in the original Post story—problems which I still attribute to Kreb's poor reporting, further accerbated by George Ou's babbling. But, Maynor appears to have found a serious problem at the time.

I think the lesson here is how not to report on a security flaw. I also can't help but wonder just exactly what Apple was doing during this time.

Link

Crash Windows Vista With Two Keystrokes

I caught this one via Fake Steve, a weblog that continues to be interesting and hilarious even after the New York Times exposed the true author.

According to Fake Steve and Information Week Windows Vista has a serious achillies heel: the "E" key. Apparently, holding the Window key and the letter "E" for ten seconds, will totally crash the system.
Nice. I can't wait to get calls from people because family cat managed to make the new Vista machine completely unresponsive by stepping across the keyboard.

Mark Cuban Effuses on MacBook, Flails English Language

Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, was so frustrated with his experience with Windows Vista that he purchased a MacBook and apparently loves it. Interestingly enough, the self-anointed 'technology maverick' once starred in his very own HP commercial.

First is that when I close my MacBook without turning it off, it doesn't lose power. It can sit there for hours and then work when I open it up. The 2nd is that it rarely freezes up. Maybe 3 or 4 times in months. Finally, i LOVE the fact that it boots up in 1/1000000000 of the time it takes my PC. It probably will add years to my life .. (ok an exaggeration).

Great Mark, now maybe we can do something about this:

When you get as many emails as I do. Thats a problem. When it also causes the system to freeze, its more than just a problem. My first step was to get a copy of CPU Magazine with Vista tricks. The tricks helped. Everything froze or crashed less often. Significantly less often. But the annoyance factor was beyond belief. I dont run any special applications. I run outlook, Office and firefox. Thats it.

Seriously, Mark there's this thing called a comma, try it sometime.

The iPhone, Buy One Seriously

Everyone has already written everything that could be written about the iPhone, so I'll be quick, it's just really cool. The interface is so fantastic it makes people smile and there are so many thoughtful touches abound that I can't help but be impressed.

Lots of tech pundits will babble endlessly about the lack of 3G, expandable memory, and the lack of a hard keyboard, but quite simply the iPhone rises about these possible flaws with an interface that it's so intuitive as to be nearly magical. Is it perfect? Not by a long shot, but it is very, very good.