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Mac Developer Mulls Zero-day Security Response

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the in-the-nick-of-time dept.

1.6 Beta writes "Landon Fuller, the Mac programmer/Darwin developer behind the 'month of Apple fixes' project, plans to expand the initiative to roll out zero-day patches for issues that put Mac OS X users at risk of code execution attacks. The former engineer in Apple's BSD Technology Group has already shipped a fix for a nasty flaw in Java's GIF image decoder and hints an an auto-updating mechanism for the third-party patches. The article quotes him as saying, 'Perhaps [it could be] the Mac OS equivalent to ZERT,' referring to the Zero-day Emergency Response Team."

2 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Re:no trolls?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I think MOAB story is getting stale. I submitted a story on how MOAB website tried to crash Safari using .jp2 vulnerability and include the comment

    <!-- Never use the macbook at bed again when browsing the MoAB or you will fry your balls, looper -->
    in the HTML code. However, /. didn't bother accepting it.

    MOAB includes hack attempt
  2. Re:no trolls?! by Cysgod · · Score: 5, Interesting

    quiet night tonight... not one mac fan boy or anti-mac troll has popped up yet, though im sure its just a matter of time Reversing the broken code that people find and figuring out how to patch it can be a great, fun mental exercise if it's something you're interested in. The personal satisfaction from doing that is sometimes offset by all this seemingly inevitable rabblerousing between fanbois and, their complementary particle, anti-fanbois.

    When fanbois and anti-fanbois come into contact they emit a special radiation that causes a temporal shift, known informally as "a colossal total waste of time", for anyone who happens to be reading or listening. For example, you're reading a technical thread, then two of these subsentient particles come into contact. They insist on threadjacking your discussion into an us versus them discussion that only tangentially involves the subject at hand and is logically irritating since it represents a false dilemma. As you skip past the messages looking for some meaningful discussion and swearing about the state of technical discourse, you suddenly discover two hours have passed due to the temporal-moronic radiation.

    Maybe people could study training Bayesian filters to delete those messages (or just delete the authors).