Cody Taylor

Although it appeared that Apple was close to wrapping up development of Mac OS X 10.5.7 late last week, a new pre-release distribution of the software was dropped on developers Wednesday afternoon with a handful of additional tweaks added to mix.

It seems unthinkable today — but more than two decades ago, when personal computers were still new and everybody listened to music on a Walkman, Steve Jobs was cast out of Apple. The year was 1985. IBM and Microsoft dominated the world of computing. The revolutionary Macintosh, launched with such fanfare just a year earlier, appeared to be…

The news that a House committee was reopening its investigation into security risks posed by file-sharing software reminded me of something one of my pals in the computer-security field once told me. The biggest vulnerabilities aren’t caused by deficiencies in machines or their software; they’re caused by the humans who use them.

alphadogg writes “Security researchers demonstrated how to take control of a computer running Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 7 operating system at the Hack In The Box Security Conference (HITB) in Dubai on Thursday. Researchers Vipin Kumar and Nitin Kumar used proof-of-concept code they developed, called VBootkit 2.0, to take control of a Windows 7 virtual machine while it was booting up. ‘There’s no fix for this. It cannot be fixed. It’s a design problem,’ Vipin Kumar said, explaining the software exploits the Windows 7 assumption that the boot process is safe from attack. While VBootkit 2.0 shows how an attacker can take control of a Windows 7 computer, it’s not necessarily a serious threat. For the attack to work, an attacker must have physical access to the victim’s computer. The attack can not be done remotely.” Which makes me wonder why I’m posting this :)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With researchers reporting the first Macintosh-specific malware to be found “in the wild” on the Internet, Mac users want to know what to do.

yahoi writes ” According to the DarkReading article, ‘Researchers have discovered a major botnet operating out of the Ukraine that has infected 1.9 million machines, including large corporate and government PCs mainly in the U.S. The botnet, which appears to be larger than the infamous Storm botnet was in its heyday, has infected machines from some 77 government-owned domains — 51 of which are in the US government. Researchers from Finjan who found the botnet say it’s controlled by six individuals, and includes machines in major banks.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

smolloy writes “The world’s first X-ray laser (LCLS) has seen first light. A Free Electron Laser (FEL) is based on the light that is emitted by accelerated electrons when they are forced to move in a curved path. The beam then interacts with this emitted light in order to excite coherent emission (much like in a regular laser); thus producing a very short, extremely bright, bunch of coherent X-ray photons. The engineering expertise that went into this machine is phenomenal — ‘This is the most difficult light source that has ever been turned on,’ said LCLS Construction Project Director John Galayda. ‘It’s on the boundary between the impossible and possible, and within two hours of start-up these guys had it right on.’ — and the benefits to the applied sciences from research using this light can be expected to be enormous: ‘For some disciplines, this tool will be as important to the future as the microscope has been to the past.’ said SLAC Director Persis Drell.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last I checked Macs don’t come with Photoshop…