kam

one of those blogs

A hacker managed to break into a Mac and win a $10,000 prize as part of a contest started at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver.

In winning the contest, he exposed a hole in Safari, Apple’s browser. "Currently, every copy of OS X out there now is vulnerable to this," said Sean Comeau, one of the organizers of CanSecWest.

The conference organizers decided to offer the contest in part to draw attention to possible security shortcomings in Macs. "You see a lot of people running OS X saying it’s so secure, and frankly, Microsoft is putting more work into security than Apple has," said Dragos Ruiu, the principal organizer of security conferences including CanSecWest.

Dino Di Zovie, who lives in New York, sent along a URL that exposed the hole. Because the contest was only open to attendees in Vancouver, he sent it to a friend who was at the conference and forwarded it on.

The URL opened a blank page but exposed a vulnerability in input handling in Safari, Comeau said. An attacker could use the vulnerability in a number of ways, but Di Zovie used it to open a back door that gave him access to anything on the computer, Comeau said.

The vulnerability won’t be published. 3Com’s TippingPoint division, which put up the cash prize, will handle disclosing it to Apple.

One reason Macs haven’t been much of a target for hackers is that there are fewer to attack, said Terri Forslof, manager of security response for TippingPoint. "It’s an incentive issue. The Mac is not as widely deployed of a platform as, say, Windows," she said. In this case, the cash may have provided motivation.

Was it a coincidence that on late Thursday Apple released a patch for 25 vulnerabilities in OS X? 

    Non-Asian people are trying – "Ok, I am taking these two sticks, and trying to lift a piece of meat. Ok, I am taking these two sticks, and trying to lift a piece of meat. Ok, I am taking these two sticks, and trying to lift a piece of meat… Oh.. common screw that – give me my fork!"

    Asian people are laughing – "Look, they are eating with forks, how primitive those creatures are. Let us screw with their mind a bit more, let’s give them a chork…"

    A clever idea – don’t you find? That is what Asian people, nowdays, call Chork, or "Chopsticks for masses". This training chopsticks will enable all "Asian wanna be eaters" to transition smoothly from something as boring as forks and knives.

- Hey, mom, what channel is GOOGLE on today? – You’re my silly boy… – on every channel. You see these little ads on the right of our 65” TV screen? – Hey, mom, I am bored, can you turn on the radio? – Sure, sweety.. Oh, your favorite "GOOGLE tunes" – Yea, mom, GOOGLE knows what I like

Information right from the source

Google CEO Eric Schmidt on "How big is the market for all these Google ads":

Today, the vast majority of our revenue is in text ads correlated with searches. In the last couple of years, we have developed what are called display ad products, including banner ads, video ads, click-to-call ads, and things like that. And I’ve also said that we are pursuing the possibility of television advertising. By that I mean traditional television advertising. And we bought dMarc Broadcasting to do radio ads.

So let’s rank the probability of them being affected by targeted ads. There’s search: That’s 100 percent affected. What about radio? Is it possible to get a targeted ad right to your car right now? Not yet because we can’t target the individual receiver in your car. If two cars are next to each other, the same radio station cannot have two different ads. However, if it’s at a regional level we can do it to the zip code level. So let’s call that partial targeting.

Now, let’s look at television. Every one of the next generation of cable set-top boxes is going to get upgraded to an IP-addressable set-top box. So all of a sudden, that set-top box is a computer that we can talk to. We can’t tell whether it’s the daughter or the son or the husband or the wife in a household. All we know is we’re just talking to the television. But that’s pretty targetable because family buying patterns are pretty predictable, and you can see what programs they’re watching. And if you’re watching a YouTube video, we know you’re watching that video.

My point of going through this little treatise is to say, if the total available market is ($600 billion to $800 billion, we won’t be able to target all $800 billion. It will not be a 100 percent perfectly targetable, straight into your brain, but we should be able to offer a material improvement (in response rates) to many businesses.