The Univeristy of Wisconsin has thrown down the gauntlet
to hackers everywhere after they deemed the previous “hack my mini”
contest too easy. The original “hack” was merely a “privilege
escalation” and not a full break-in to a protected system.
Via vnunet.com

Apparently, a Mac fan set up his Mini
as a server and challenged all comers to try to break in. That wasn’t a
smart move as the contest was essentially over in less than a half
hour. Yep. Zero-to-root in 20 minutes. And yes, if you own a Mini, you
are vunerable too as the hacker used an unpublished, unpatched exploit.

Although Gwerdna said that Mac OS X contains unpatched
vulnerabilities that would permit a hacker to infiltrate Apple’s
operating system, he said that the relatively small number of Macs in
use — in contrast to the vast number of PCs running Windows — is the
reason more hackers do not try to exploit them.

Maybe Apple’s thinking their Switch campaign was a little too successful?

Apple has joined the Ruby on Rails bandwagon. Check out their tutorial .. it’s much more complete than some of the popular walkthroughs out there.

First published on Monday, February 27th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
Last October, a new federal bankruptcy bill went into law that makes
it harder for people to declare bankruptcy. The premise of the bill,
known as the “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005” is that consumers were spending irresponsibly and then walking away from their debts.

It turns out that the premise was flawed. In the first analysis of
filings since the bill came into effect, it was found that 97% of all
filers truly could not pay their debts. In fact, only 1 in 20 were
candidates for a debt management plan. In addition,

Only about one in five (21 percent) of those seen by a
credit-counseling firm were identified as racking up debt due to
‘’circumstances within their control.

That may seem high, but don’t forget that’s only 21% of those who were candidates for the debt management plan.

For more information, read Surprise! Bankruptcy filers really are broke - The Boston Globe