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Firefox currently has the slowest DOM manipulation of any of the major browsers.

iBench 5.0 has ff 3.0 only slightly slower at DOM than opera 9.5 and safari 3.1, and many times faster than ie7 and ie8.

Various sites have posted results, but to pick one http://www.zdnet.com.au/story_media/339289417/browsers_graph_2_423.jpg (hope the direct link works, otherwise try dragndrop).

Hey, didn't that look like the pic from when Bill got arrested for speeding?

In fact I think it was! I thought the commercial was kind of amusing, esp with that speeding pic in there. HAW HAW (Doesn't do anything to push product, but I guess they must not care about that)

If Microsoft is not threatening to sue over patents, why would they hand Novell a boatload of money to sign a patent deal with royalties going back to Microsoft for every Novell Linux sold? Microsoft paid Novell a bunch of money to do this deal, and all of this after remarks about patent violations in Linux.

It's quite obvious Microsoft wants people to pay for Linux with royalties going to Microsoft, under the threat of lawsuit. And in case you need the threat spelled out for you, Ballmer did so, multiple times:

http://www.forbes.com/home/enterprisetech/2006/03/22/ballmer-microsoft-linux-cz_df_0322microsoft.html
"Well, I think there are experts who claim Linux violates our intellectual property. I'm not going to comment. But to the degree that that's the case, of course we owe it to our shareholders to have a strategy."

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Ballmer_repeats_threats_against_Linux/0,130061733,339273726,00.htm
"I would not anticipate that we make a huge additional revenue stream from our Novell deal, but I do think it clearly establishes that open source is not free, and open source will have to respect the intellectual property rights of others just as any other competitor will."

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2200717/microsoft-sharpens-aims-patent
"People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us"

Did someone lie to you or did you just make that up? There are no new Intel or AMD desktop CPUs in the current or next three generations that will be less than 100W, much less 20W or 10W! For example, the new Tukwila is ~130W.

Even laptop CPUs have a hard time being that efficient. Maybe you're thinking of Via or Transmeta CPUs? Embedded ARM cores?

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/soa/DNS-patch-causes-BIND-blunder/0,130061744,339290928,00.htm Could this have been what took Apple so long? Not as entertaining as posting "Apple sucks", but worth a look nonetheless.

But nobody has yet been able to hack a Mac convincingly.

Think with your head, not with your bias. Security (or lack thereof) is not directly proportional to market share.

wow I can't believe there are still people out there as totally clueless as yourself. how about you do a little bit of research and you can find yourself some nice hacks for MAc's or you could download the latest explout kits that target this vulnerability and go to town on OS X servers out there.

eg here is an old article from a few years ago which came at the top of my search
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/soa/Mac-OS-X-hacked-under-30-minutes/0,130061744,139241748,00.htm

come out from under your rock and join the real world, OS X has some very real security issues, over 200 vulnerabilities in the last 12 months combined with slow patching and poor handling of real world issues.

FF loads pages faster than opera or IE. And it doesnt have a memory leak. Some addons might i dont know. Take this, I leave my computer on for several months at a time including FF open. I often use multiple windows (currently have 2FF windows up) and always a decent number of tabs (8 and 4). This computer has 256MB of ram and has never brought the system to its knees. Also I use 6 addons. If there were a memory leak i'd have noticed. That and a nice variety of tests, in speed and ram usage have shown FF to beat Opera and IE (last i checked, opera has likely improved lately to keep up). Please don't slander without showing your information.
  http://avencius.nl/content/firefox-3-vs-opera-950-memory-usage
  http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/software/internet/soa/Browser-faceoff-IE-vs-Firefox-vs-Opera-vs-Safari/0,139023437,339289417-1,00.htm
  http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-13626-0.html?forumID=102&threadID=266786&messageID=2542057

Get your priorities right people. I submitted a story around about the same time as this, about yet another huge breach of privacy by Facebook (Here's the story if anyone is interested: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/soa/Logged-in-or-out-Facebook-is-watching-you/0,130061744,339284281,00.htm/). I watched my submission get closer to the red as time passed and this ridiculous advertisement for a film about an animated robot get closer to the black. Now it's on the front page and mine is resigned to the fate of whatever happens to washed up submissions.

Sigh.

CmdrTaco taking money from from Pixar? Maybe he just likes cartoons? Or maybe I need to get a life...

* firefox (for revolutionizing the web)
* petrol from algae tech ( great potential there )
* photonic switch ( see http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Sydney-Uni-hero-chip-breaks-light-speed-record/0,130061791,339290492,00.htm )

regards

I've read the linked article a few times and I'm not sure where there is anything to indicate he is mad. Nice use of alliteration though. I did find this article about the difference in growth between the two sites and it has a lot more information about the situation in general, though nothing about Murdoch's reaction. I couldn't find anything more about that - like where and when he said the things they say he said, what the tone was, etc.

The problem is, "faster" is absolutely not a value judgment. It's testable and quantifiable, and the claim that Opera is "faster," at least according to one benchmark, doesn't seem to be true. I won't even go into memory usage. I personally think we should reserve judgment until we can test final releases against eachother, but I think a troll mod is perfectly appropriate.

If opera dev's team can't be beaten then they must have a ultrafast version hidden somewhere, because the public versions, including 9.5 betas, are already slower than firefox 3 and webkit on many benchmarks

Obviously, Microsoft is a software company, they want to make money selling their software as they have in the past. And now, more and more I think that free and open source software obviously puts a wrench in their historical business plans and profits.

I hardly consider Microsoft's buy out of Novell a contribution towards open source software. Except for Microsoft, big companies, like IBM, are paying open source developers for their work. I think that adding monetary reward to open source projects has both pros and cons attached to it. The developers get the benefit of payment for their work. The big company may have other strategic schemes in mind like, perhaps only making their wares integrate with the open source software. For example, although the Linux kernel will work on a number of CPUs, it is still primarily targeted for the legacy and proprietary x86 processors. In my opinion, the Linux kernel would be better if it worked well on lots of cores, especially open cores such as massively parallel mini CPUs.

Speaking of abandoned open source projects, there is also a lot of dead code which is owned by companies in the name of intellectual property, and failed projects. Call it corporate abandon-ware. Corporate abandon-ware is not easily available to just any developer who feels like picking it up. On the other hand, abandoned source projects can be more easily revived if a developer feels inclined to do so, and we see this happen.

Interesting... I assumed Macarena was another miscatorgized trojan or worm. Thanks for pointing it out.

Having now read about it though, it appears to be more of a cheap trick than a virus. Let's examine it shall we:

1. It's restricted to the current directory. You'd have to drop it in just the right spot... someapp.app/Contents/MacOS/ package directory or maybe in /usr/bin/
2. It won't work on Universal or PPC binaries, only Intel-only binaries are affected. That pretty much rules out anything system related, since Apple ships everything as a universal binary.
3. Most importantly, it is unable to carry a payload. It can't do anything but replicate.

So that is the only Mac OS X virus in existence? I'm terrified ;-) According to the ZDNet article, even the author gave up in frustration. To the authors credit, it seems just getting it to replicate was ingenious. I'd love to see the source.

If it could carry a payload, it might pose a problem for people using pre-compiled intel binaries, but then you're still stuck in the current directory and only able to infect other intel-only binaries. You're never going to do much damage with that as long as Apple continues distributing universal binaries.

Simply put, it pales in comparison to the damage one borked anti-virus package can do. It even pales in comparison to the cost and inconvenience of a well designed anti-virus package. Frankly, you're better off infected with Macarena than Norton's ;-)

A battle Mircrosoft seems to be winning:

Microsoft said sales of Office 2008, which launched in January, are nearly three times what the company saw with the launch of Office 2004. The suite is selling faster than any version in 19 years. Sales Of Office For Mac Highest In Nearly 20 Years [May 13]

Nowhere is the gap between philosophical acceptance and actual adoption clearer than on the desktop where -- despite critical praise of recent Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and the backing of Sun for the OpenOffice productivity suite -- Linux has still failed in its mission to supplant incumbent Microsoft and its Windows-Office dominance.
Early Linux-fuelled enthusiasm wouldn't have predicted the apathy the market has shown for the far lower-cost solutions offered by the open-source community. In late 2002, a Giga report projected that "the arrival of attractively priced competing office suites combined with dissatisfaction with current Microsoft licensing plans will create upwards of a five percent market share loss" for Microsoft.
Betting against Microsoft in any industry has always been a bad idea. In a March Forrester presentation, Giga's optimism proved misplaced: "The lack of a viable, enterprise-ready alternative to Microsoft Office -- particularly an alternative to Outlook -- will keep Microsoft firmly planted in the enterprise for the foreseeable future."
Ditto the desktop, where Windows continues to reign supreme. In 2004, IDC predicted that growing Linux adoption would push the operating system from three percent market share to seven percent by 2008. Even those figures paled compared to the predictions of Siemens Business Systems, which in 2003 predicted that Linux would have captured 20 percent of the enterprise desktop market by 2008.
It is now 2008, and Windows is still the dominant operating system; if anything, Mac OS X has supplanted Linux as the alternative desktop of choice. Linux is out there, but erratically: it runs, for example, on ASUS's popular Eee mini-notebook PC and in March was chosen by IBM for low-cost PCs to be shipped to customers in Eastern Europe. Despite a few isolated purchases, however, desktop PC purchases are still all about Windows. Linux: Who got it right, who got it very wrong? [May 15]

Police over here in WA have a special distro designed for forensics.

Please read this article about CSIRO's TED, a solution meant to solve this exact security problem:

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/print.htm?TYPE=story&AT=339286124-130061744t-110000005c

Haven't those little feisty tasmanians already done this?
http://www.zdnet.com.au/tag/broadband-power_line-tasmania.htm

Actually they run Hyperion against Oracle on *gasp* a windows box.

Ironically, Woz also relates how his comments on Apple may get taken out of context:

[Jobs] calls me and he says he doesn't like something that I was reputed to have said. But he gets it out of context. A reporter's seized on a comment and strung along with that. I'm very positive on Apple, but I'll also point out things that could be better, or aren't the way I'd like them to be. To that point, several journalists have picked up this story with a very negative slant:

- Wozniak slams iPhone, MacBook Air
- Woz finds flaws in Apple's latest offerings
- Wozniak 'disappointed' by Apple iPhone
- Former Apple founder vents over iPhone's pitfalls

Actually Office 2007 is one of my pet peeves. Incidentally, Microsoft nowadays seems to be breaking all UI standards just for the sake of the change. For instance, you can see several rants on Vista's new Windows Explorer, IE7's lack of menu bar, and Office's infamous ribbon.

Funnily enough, sometime ago, the excuse not to adopt non-MS technology was that the interface doesn't follow Windows guidelines, it doesn't integrate with Windows as well as Microsoft applications (this was always a complaint with Lotus Notes on a company I worked for).

Now, Microsoft is making this problem irrelevant, since their own software doesn't follow Windows guidelines anymore. Heck, not even the different families of Windows apps are not consistent. If you see Office, IE, Messenger, WMP, it looks like each one of them was made by a completely different software vendor.

There are industry estimates that say average code in production contains 2 bugs per thousand lines of code. Some say that number is much higher. How many lines do you think are in Vista?

Yes, OSS has bugs. Everything from compilers to content management systems, surely. So do proprietary programs.

The more qualified eyes you get on a bug, the better chance you have of finding and fixing it. You can do that by having a big staff that pores over code again and again. You can do it by having lots of outside help, like in the case of popular OSS projects. One thing that helps is to have a fresh set of eyes look over something, which is much easier in OSS that in closed-source applications.

BusinessWeek had an article from a guy at Coverity back in 2006 about this. In that article, Ben Chelf said that 4 of the top 15 programs on the quality scale measured by defects per thousand lines of code were OSS. He said that on average, the major-project OSS software they tested was indeed higher quality software than average. He said, though, that the absolute highest quality code was the cream-of-the-crop proprietary, closed source code from places that make things like fly-by-wire systems. Well, yeah. I'd want my airliner's fly-by-wire system completely bug-free, too.

Commercial software tends to harbor anywhere from 1 to 7 bugs per 1000 lines of code according to the National Cybersecurity Partnership's Working Group on the Software Lifecycle. Voluntary testing by Coverity requested (and probably paid for) by MySQL AB revealed that project to have all of 97 flaws, one of which could be a serious security issue. All 97 were to be fixed for the next release.

A similar study (same link) found 985 bugs in over 5,700,000 lines in the Linux kernel, or fewer than one bug per 10,000 lines of code. TFA has data on a newer version of the kernel -- 0.127 bugs per TLOC.

In Apache, 22 bugs total, 0.14 per TLOC, and three fixed so far.

PostgreSQL had 0.041 per TLOC, and have so far fixed 53 of the 90 bugs.

The glibc team fixed 83 of 83 bugs found.

OpenVPN had found one security-related bug in over 69,000 lines of code. As of later yesterday, it's officially security bug free according to the same testing people.

The list of officially security-bug free software includes Amanda, NTP, OpenPAM, OpenVPN, Overdose, Perl, PHP, Postfix, Python, Samba, and TCL.

So with Linux (0.127), glibc (0.000), Apache (0.140), PostgresSQL (0.041), Perl (0.024), PHP (0.000), and Python (0.000) powering a web server (numbers according to Coverity), you have 0.0474 defects per thousand lines of code across the server. I'd say that's pretty good.

If you remember back when XP was released it did suck compared to 2000. 2000 was the mature product. You want a fair comparison you'll need compare Vista now to XP 1 year after release.

Actually, a fair comparison would be to compare Windows XP to Windows ME (or Windows 98). And I was actually able to find one: ZDNet Review

They seam to be pretty happy with the upgrade, saying that it is "Definitely worth the cost of the upgrade! ... Two thumbs up! While some of the features in this new operating system aren't all that exciting, the overall consensus is that those features in the areas of stability and support definitely make Windows XP Home Edition worth the cost of upgrading. ".

I know that this is just one review, but I am pretty sure that most reviews did agree. A company can release an upgrade that is better right away, as even Microsoft has done it before. This review was dated Sept 15 2001, a month before Windows XP's release.

Thinking that Windows Vista must be the future of the Windows OS is like going back to early 2001 and saying that Windows ME is the future of Windows. If enough people keep complaining (especially with their pocket books) then Microsoft might actually listen. They did with Windows ME.

--

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/US-ruling-makes-server-RAM-a-document-/0,130061733,339278641,00.htm

China has officially responded to German media reports of Chinese hacking of government computer systems in Berlin by assuring German officials that it prohibits attacks on computer networks.

> I don't remember the last time I had a virus take down more than a couple of machines

Do you mean the last one you caught was a year ago, or that your metrics date back a year and show remediation and assesment has been effective?

A lot of the windows exploits have moved* beyond the brain-dead slammer worm that let you know something was hosed. From my experience, many IT shops haven't got the resources, software or experience to stay ahead of the technical level of the malware that is coming down the pike. It seems to me that the malware authors have been going to school while the IT industry has been playing hookey. I'm not picking on Windows even though it makes a great target; Linux, Mac and the other alternatives need to be thinking about how userland can be exploited by the same means - otherwise, we've merely traded one sinking ship for another.

[*]
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2205606,00.asp
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/soa/Eighty-percent-of-new-malware-defeats-antivirus/0,130061744,139263949,00.htm

In Australia, the political parties lie, and 733t h4xorz get to tell the truth...

with an appended "x" or "m" (the "m" is if you have macros embedded) - e.g. ".docx" and ".docm" [filext.com]."

I'm on the bubble over that. I saw plenty of references to an 80% miss rate in '05, but most seemed to be referring to an abstract of a vendor presentation to be made at a conference, which struck me as poor journalism.
http://conference.auscert.org.au/conf2005/abstracts.php

But the general manager at auscert seemed to be saying the same thing in 5/06:
-----
The survey, which was published at the start of this year's AusCERT 2006 conference on the Gold Coast, is further evidence that malware writers are targeting their attacks and testing their code to ensure it is undetectable by antivirus products before it is distributed.
According to the survey, 98 percent of respondents have deployed an antivirus application and yet 45 percent reported being infected by a virus or worm.
Graham Ingram, general manager of AusCERT, said that cybercriminals are making a "concerted effort" to defeat antivirus technology -- and they are being successful.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/soa/Antivirus-software-is-being-defeated-/0,130061744,139257227,00.htm
-----

So, how about something more up to date?
Friday, April 13, 2007
Storm Worm Blast Still Evades Antivirus
http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/004102.html

So why would I be on the bubble, instead of completely agreeing with you? Well, I hear the argument that since people can't be trained to not click on unverified attachments, security suites are at least *something*. In the back of my mind is the thought that if people didn't believe in these ratty security nets, perhaps they *would* change their behavior.

Another factor may lie in how corporations mitigate risk through insurance. Being able to check the AV box when seeking insurance might keep a policy affordable.

Anyone remember the Virgin Webplayer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Webplayer I am more excited about http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/hardware/soa/Intel-to -launch-Linux-powered-mobile-Internet-device/0,130 061702,339274887,00.htm

(yes, there's Linux, there's MacOS, but what company would switch?)

Ernie Ball
Wotif.com
Burlington Coat Factory
Peugeot

Just to name a few.

And of course IBM and Novell, but they don't count, as they are strong GNU/Linux players.

Of course, Siemens was a bit off in their prediction of 20% market share by 2008. But I'd say there's the chance we might make 20% some day.

Do this and read articles like this Maybe not perfect, but I'd call it reform.

What good points? It has a resource intensive "shiny" interface. It has levels of DRM heretofore unseen in an operating system. It is claimed that it is secure, yet still has gaping security holes. It is claimed that it is safe, yet has to be made un-safe for users to be able to do anything with it. It is expensive, clunky, space consuming, privacy invading, insecure, unsafe, and is more interested in protecting the interests of major Hollywood distributors than its users.

Care to highlight why I'd want to use Vista?

If Sun frees up Solaris using the Java timeline, I have a feeling you're going to be using GNU/ Hurd way before then. Sun is going to pussyfoot around for years.

I know. They are dumb nuts. They could have taken a much larger market share long time ago.
Though some, especially Jonathan, are changing:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Sun-look s-to-GPL-v3-for-Java-Solaris/0,130061733,339273561 ,00.htm
SUN has effectively tried to go GPLv3 for SunOS for quite a time. But now we have the 3l33t OpenSolaris developpers who torpedo any such effort tooth and nail.
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messag eID=84380&
is one example. Of many.
It is a pity that SUN provided this comfort zone for them; so that instead of doing the dirty work to achieve world domination, they cherish and please themselves in an ivory tower. A place that witnesses the conception of fantastic software (ZFS, Zones, DTrace), but seemingly rather fosters egomaniac arrogance than the notion of sharing and teamwork.

It's not for Windows Mobile either.

LiveDrive is one of the Vista features that slipped from the actual release. http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Microsof t-confirms-Live-Drive-plans/0,130061733,139267189, 00.htm

Looks like the space they're offering has slipped a bit too. Still, size isn't important, is it guys?

Kind of a funny story considering some security venders claim Vista is less secure than XP: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Microsof t-partner-Vista-less-secure-than-XP/0,130061733,33 9274261,00.htm Based on my early experiences with Vista in our Beta roll out users are generally annoyed with Vista's security features and will likely turn them off once they are saavy enough to do so. The VPN compatability problems they are having with major vendors such as Juniper's VPN solutions also give me reason for pause. Some users will basically start taking files home with him and emailing them to co-workers since they cannot use the VPN. This is a major concern when it involves personal data. Vista may be an improvement on the home front, but it is plain not ready for business.

The iPod has come a long way in audio quality since gen 1, but its relatively decent 83dB S/N ratio (shown here) gets flat-out whupped by the plainly excellent 98 dB S/N ratio of the Zen Xtra (here).

I'm guessing, from the mac.com address, that you'll either argue against this solid evidence with mac-protecting nonsense or not respond.

It's okay to buck the trend and admit two things:

1) It was a joke.
2) Apple is not always the best at everything. They are a company that, like many others, sells things manufactured by third parties in China, and, as with other companies, real-world cost-considerations come into play along with the limitations of their designers and engineers.

The second is probably harder to admit.

Happy dining...

In other words, you cannot fathom the distinctions posed, and therefor assume that someone is *too stupid* to communicate with.

I'll wait while you work on your education and intelligence quotient. Once your IQ has risen to an even playing field we can continue.

Yes, it actually was making Solaris more like linux, than linux - if you go BACK in time, you'll find where that statement was actually made.

Actually, here...I've done the homework for you. http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/ning.jsp/

And, no, making something more Linux-like, does not equate to making something more like Linux, depending on the context of the term "Linux".

According to some, Linux is not just a kernel, but an ideal.

To make something in accordance with an ideal, does not make something more like a kernel.

However, to go even further... Their meaning behind that phrase is to make Solaris more *familiar* to Linux users. It doesn't necessarily mean, they want to go away from what Solaris is, nor should they.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/-Sun-hop es-for-Linux-like-Solaris/0,130061733,339276057,00 .htm/

They just want to make some changes so that those familiar with Linux can adjust to Solaris without the huge culture shock that Linux is to those familiar with AIX/HP-UX and yes, even older Solaris versions.

Sometime's Martin, it's better to remain quiet. Try and remember that.

Also, the idea that virtualization has "no overhead" is expensive marketing hype: the idea that virtualization reduces power consumption is the exact opposite of the truth. My MacBook runs hotter with Parallels running that it does without it.

Power consumption goes up with virtualization generally. Consider this ZD Net article on the hidden costs of virtualization (the silent enemy). Anyone considering virtualizing a server farm needs to include the cost of increased power and A/C consumption in their calculations.

. Hook up customers on a cheaply solution based on Linux and MySQL.

As customer's data and number of clients grow they will start experiencing scalability problems.

Propose much more scalable, reliable, dependable (and much more expensive) solution on AIX, AS/400, Mainframe.

Hi.

Apparently you couldn't read the text on the original "test" site.

The "test" wasn't to "prove" Mac OS X was "secure". It was to quickly disprove the flurry of articles going around saying it was possible to hack any network-connected Mac in 30 minutes or less, when the original article forgot to point out that the test system in that scenario allowed ANYONE remote ssh access, and someone used a local root exploit (still a serious issue, but hardly close to the articles essentially saying any network-connected Mac OS X machine can now be easily hacked remotely, which was the implication of all of the articles covering the rapidly spreading story). That was the quickest and highest profile way to prove the stories false, and it did just that. The AP and other large outlets were looking at picking up the original false story, which would in turn have been carried by thousands of local papers and news outlets. But they didn't after they saw this "test" and its commentary.

I also said that there are serious security handling concerns on Mac OS X that need to be addressed, and that it seemed that intelligent and serious discourse on the topic of Mac OS X security is necessary, instead of sky-is-falling sensational stories every time there is any kind of security issue, real or perceived, on Mac OS X. I also said, specifically, that the test didn't really "prove" anything other than that the default configurations of apache httpd and OpenSSH as shipped by Apple on Mac OS X are at least marginally secure from a network perspective. So what does it "prove"? Nothing, except that there is no purpose to scare people into believing that any Mac OS X machine connected to any network can be hacked into at will, which was literally the main point of the article and most of the headlines coming out of the original ZDnet australia story.

Yeah, guess that makes me an "idiot Mac zealot"!

To the AC's below: I didn't stop posting on slashdot, and anyone who thinks they know the story and purports to be affiliated with UW, you're welcome to come to my office and say something to my face. Thanks.

Here is the original text of the site:


Mac OS X Security Test

Tue 7 March 2006 11:59 PM CST (8 March 2006 0559 GMT)

The testing period is now closed.

- The response has been very strong, and the test has illustrated its point.
- Traffic to the host spiked at over 30 Mbps.
- Most of the traffic, aside from casual web visitors, was web exploit scripts, ssh dictionary attacks, and scanning tools such as Nessus.
- The machine was under intermittent DoS attack. During the two brief periods of denial of service, the host remained up.
- The test machine was a Mac mini (PowerPC) running Mac OS X 10.4.5 with Security Update 2006-001, had two local accounts, and had ssh and http open with their default configurations.
- There were no successful access attempts of any kind, including during the 38 hour duration of the test period, nor have their been any claims of success. The host is still the same host and configuration used for the test.

Some snippets from 7 March 2006:

- The site received almost a half a million requests via the web.
- There were over 4000 login attempts via ssh.
- The ipfw log grew at 40MB/hour and contains 6 million events logged.
- Several social engineering attempts were received, including one purporting to be from the government of Sweden, which apparently uses GMail. ;-)
- More test results and information will be published here at a future date.

Mon 6 March 2006 10:00 AM CST

In response to the woefully misleading ZDnet article, Mac OS X hacked under 30 minutes, a Mac OS X Security Test has been launched. (Test is now concluded.)

The ZDnet article, and almost all of the coverage of it, failed to mention a very critical point: anyone who wished it

Oh yeah, and where do your facts come from?

IT is a hard world, and with massive amounts of cash involved.
The truth is often burried deeply in a shower of propaganda that makes honest efforts and genius technology almost lost - "like tears in the rain"...

The site is know to be pro Apple. But A LOT of things you read there are true. The guy from RDM has some good inside information, and historical correctness overall. Especially covering the Quicktime debacle in the late nineties, I know he is right. The author is not bashing, or getting awfully personal. And although he might not be 100% correct with his figure material, he blows away some smokescreens and uncovers misinformation, and exposes the truly destructive business practices of our sweet little giant.

Oh and wait, who's on crack here?
"Vista can run just fine on computers from the same timeframe if you can find one that supports 256-512mb of RAM"
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9011523

"The hardware is middle of the road, and OSX is not well known for performance in any areas"
http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/software/os/soa/Ap ple_Mac_OS_10_4_Tiger/0,139023442,139190318,00.htm

After you read the articles, come back and let me tell you that I have a 1999 PowerMac 20GB HD running 10.4 with 512 MB RAM, and it performs faster and smoother than with 10.3. No upgrades attached except the RAM.

So happy I still party like it's 1999. ;-)

DRM is fine as long as you or your employer has the keys. I don't believe the FSF organization is against using DRM code, they're against large corporations in control of your data and the fact that the box is no longer yours/the owner of the box. In fact, some governments are against trusted computing. You can also see this with EFI's acceptance problem since it was built with trusted computing in mind, which ironically could make it a security risk. The big companies want to control your data with keys and revocation lists, they don't seem to care much about the actual security that people want.

So no, OOo won't replace MSOffice quite yet

You're absolutely right. I agree 100%.
And that's exactly why governments entities and educational institutions in Texas, Massachusetts, Israel, India, Singapore, Germany, France, Brazil, China, Macedonia, Denmark, and from the opendocument fellowship *deep breath*. Australia, Austria, Belgium, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Croatia, Czech Republic, EU bodies, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, UK, and from the USA: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada and New York... are NOT all switching or planning to switch to OpenOffice.

Oh wait. They are!

You need to read that link. Linus Torvalds has not switched to OS X.