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.

 

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Command Tab Screen

I am used to using Alt Tab in Windows to quickly switch between multiple window screens i have opened ( Multitasking ). The similar key combination and feature is also present in Mac. The key combination in Mac is Command + Tab which is similar to Windows’ Alt + Tab. But i find Mac’s Command+Tab feature not of great use. 

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Every now and then i need to resize windows in Mac because of the simple reason that windows in Mac dont fit to fill the entire screen also they dont have maximize button which acts in a similar way to the maximize button in Windows OS. I really dont like the Mac’s approach of maximizing any window . Macs have a green button as a comparable control to Maximize button in Windows OS. This button has different behaviors - sometimes it increases the window size so as to fit the content ( Preview, Finder etc ) and sometimes it fills the entire screen ( Text Edit ). Thats why i generally pull the window to the size i want. 

Resize Corner in Mac window

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Preview application in mac Leopard does lots of things ( eg. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 ) . One of the thing it does is reading PDF files without having to install Adobe reader for Mac. I prefer using Preview for opening PDF files than Adobe reader because preview is quick and i feel it light as well. But today i found one limitation of Preview as a PDF reader though there may be many more preview cant do which Adobe’s PDF reader can do. 

The limitation is in Preview if you have a multiple paged PDF document open and try to select a Large text . You cant just do it. Try it. By Large text here i mean that text extending in multiple pages say text in more than 1 pages or so. Preview can only select the text which is currently being displayed. You try to select the text with mouse and go down the page in the document Preview wont Scroll down as expected to select more text. Even without using mouse and instead using Shift+Arrow key combination the Preview wont let the PDF document scroll and you cant select text in the area not currently shown in front of you. This is so irritating. I had to download Adobe reader just to select the texts in the PDF document i was reading.

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Well there is one more very simple and minute reason i should be unhappy while using Mac ( being come from Windows world ). Its been more than half year i have been using Mac in my home computing use but still i am not used to its some of the behavior. This particular reason i dont like Mac is related to the Mac’s Window Full screen issue. Most of the Mac application dont go full screen to fit the monitor width but some of them do. For example i have used Adobe Photoshop which takes whole screen width while clicking Green Maximize control button . Similarly Adobe Reader and Default Mail app also behaves same. The problem i liked to mention here is even if the application window goes full screen to take the whole window width they are movable or draggable . Whats the logic behind this Apple ? Why the hell we want to move the application windows after it has taken entire screen width. We dont want to see the part of application window by moving it . The windows in this scenario should be fixed to the screen as long as user doesn’t click Green maximize button. 

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