Mac Hack Contest Redux

narramissic writes "Remember the controversial Mac hacking contest from last year's CanSecWest conference? No? Here's a refresher: Conference organizers challenged attendees to hack into a Macintosh laptop, with the successful hacker winning the computer and a cash prize. Winner Dino Dai Zovi found a QuickTime bug that allowed him to run unauthorized software on the Mac once the computer's browser was directed to a specially crafted Web page. Well, the contest is back again this year, but with a twist, says Dragos Ruiu, the principal organizer of CanSecWest: 'We're thinking of having a contest where we have Vista and OS X and Linux ... and see which one goes first.""

Re:Potential for rigging

[Anonymous Coward]

That and the fact that linux isn't an OS.

Re:What will be the GNU/Linux prize?

[calebt3]

The complete list [uncyclopedia.org]

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:"fair" would be "what users need"

[hunterkll]

OS X install by default has no network services running external and is firewalled. you have to manually turn on network sharing and services from a preference pane

Re:What about Quicktime?

[Crimson Wing]

Quicktime comes with Firefox these days

Uh, BS? Every time I've installed Firefox so far, then gone to a page with an embedded QuickTime media file, Firefox has complained of needing an additional plugin. I install QuickTime itself, and then embedded QT files play just fine.

Re:Default Install

[El Lobo]

Hmm..the default installation of IE in Vista is "sandboxed", so it will be **very hard** to install a program from it.

Re:Default Install

[Calinous]

Sure "OpenBSD has had one remote exploit in the default install in its history"

Since you've heard, the number of OpenBSD remote exploit holes doubled

Re:Lopsided...

[mgblst]

Rare? Diamonds are rare, yet I see them daily.

Diamons aren't rare, only the stupid really believe this - why do you think diamonds are rare, because they are marketed to you as such. Diamonds are carefully controlled, so they a huge amount don't flood the market, but that doesn't make them rare.

Re:Default Install

[cheesewire]

OSX comes with very little out of the box. New Macs usually come with iLife and some with iWork (or at least a trial) pre-installed - ie third party software. Mine even came with a 30 day trial of Office 2004. A stock installation of OSX doesn't include Quicktime or the like either.

When you buy a mac, it comes with iLife and Quicktime. Both are made by Apple. Both are pretty fundamental to macs providing quite a lot of functionality out of the box.

Even if you delete Quicktime.app, the quicktime framework is still there, it's needed by many things.