Let’s be careful out there

The month of Mac exploits has kicked off, with yesterday’s publication of a buffer overflow vulnerability in the latest version of QuickTime. I for one welcome the discussion of possible vulnerabilities on Mac OS X. As a long time user and computer software professional, you can only secure things through design up to a point and the more that Apple and the industry openly investigate and fix these security vulnerabilities, the better off everyone will be. More discussion on Slashdot, including an interesting disputation of the findings—is it possible that the exploit is not as general as claimed?

Update: within 24 hours a fix for the vulnerability has been posted. Interestingly, the fix comes from a former Apple developer and uses Application Enhancer to fix the vulnerability at runtime.

Yes, I know…

…quite a few meme posts recently. Forgive me: after a long downtime, I still have my blog training wheels back on, and any writing is better than no writing.

So I was tagged by Isis with this book meme:

  1. Find the nearest book.
  2. Name the book & the author.
  3. Turn to page 123.
  4. Go to the fifth sentence on the page. Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
  5. Tag three more folks.

And boy, you’re going to regret asking me this, because I’m at work and the nearest book is … well, it could have been worse:

Book: The Tipping Point (Back Bay Books, 2002)
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

p. 123, 5th sentence and ff.:

“Something that stuck in my mind was when Kermit would hold his finger to the screen and draw an animated letter, you’d see kids holding their fingers up and drawing a letter along with him. Or occasionally, when a Sesame Street character would ask a question, you’d hear kids answer out loud. But Sesame Street just somehow never took that idea and ran with it.”

Now in my defense: this is a serious book about what makes innovations and products “sticky” – keeping customers interested in the product offering. But still a kind of random connection…

Tagging: Chris, Zalm, Tin Man.