Mar 26

Below excerpt is from the interview of the Man who broke  into MacBook within 2 minutes in Pwn2Own contest. 

Alan: How much of your work today is focused on securing Macs vs. PC vs. Linux? Who is your typical customer?

Charlie: At work, I mostly look at application-level security. Most of this is really independent of operating system. For example, source code reviews or reverse engineering binaries doesn’t depend much on the operating system. I’ve spent a lot of my research time on Macs because I like them and they also happen to be pretty easy to break!

Most of ISE’s customers are small to medium size companies that care a lot about security and want to make sure their applications are secure.  The companies that only want a check box usually go somewhere else because we are pretty good at what we do and consequently charge more than many other consulting firms.

 

Read the Full Interview More reading

Mar 04

STAFF IN THE London office of a marketing company were left shocked and reeling yesterday after an Apple PowerBook burst into flames.

The company asked not to be identified, as IT manager Steven told how he was called to the scene by reports of smoke billowing out of an employee’s computer.

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Feb 27

Apple’s iPhone has wowed most of the globe — but not Japan, where the handset is selling so poorly it’s being offered for free.
What’s wrong with the iPhone, from a Japanese perspective? Almost everything: the high monthly data plans that go with it, its paucity of features, the low-quality camera, the unfashionable design and the fact that it’s not Japanese.
In an effort to boost business, Japanese carrier SoftBank this week launched the “iPhone for Everybody” campaign, which gives away the 8-GB model of the iPhone 3G if customers agree to a two-year contract.
“The pricing has been completely out of whack with market reality,” said Global Crown Research analyst Tero Kuittinen in regard to Apple’s iPhone prices internationally. “I think they [Apple and its partners overseas] are in the process of adjusting to local conditions.”

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Jan 21

While most of the websites are shortening their web URL dropping www and redirecting www to non-www URL . This trend is mainly adopted by relatively new websites ( web2.0 websites ) . Apple seems to be in the old age . In addition Apple doesn’t have any handeling if anyone typed URL without www ( at least for japan website ) . and thus misleading customers or even may be losing them. I first thought when i typed http://apple.com/jp that Apple Japan website must be down. But i tried putting the URL again with www i.e., http://www.apple.com/jp it worked fine. Really bad for Japanese Apple customers . and WTF this is a very simple thing which any website administrator should know .

UPDATE 1: seems its fixed now.. Or is it that it was the bad timing when i tried accessing http://apple.com/jp

UPDATE 2: i am still getting error when i open http://apple.com/jp with Chrome in Vista

Jan 15

Computer scientist Brian Mastenbrook has discovered a fairly serious bug in Safari’s RSS feed handling that can allow a maliciously-crafted web page to access personal information without any knowledge or intervention of the user. The information can include—but isn’t necessarily limited to—e-mails, passwords, and information stored in browser cookies.

This vulnerability affects any Mac OS X user that has Safari set as the default feed reader in Safari’s RSS preferences. You can be affected by it even if you don’t read RSS feeds or regularly use another browser such as Firefox. As for Windows users, the vulnerability only affects those who use Safari to browse the web.

Solution/Workaround for this problem is very simple.

Src