Jimmy Crack Mac and I Don’t Care

March 19th, 2009, by The Angry Drunk

So, CanSecWest ran another one of their “crack shit and we give you prizes” con­tests and sur­prise, sur­prise, the MacBook got cracked.

Ok, before we get this ball rolling let me make some­thing clear. I’m not a secu­rity expert. I’m not look­ing at this as a secu­rity expert. I’ll leave that to peo­ple much smarter than me. So, hav­ing said that, any­one who attempts to ques­tion my secu­rity exper­tise in way of rebut­tal will be shot.

I hate these sort of com­pe­ti­tions, because they are just the­ater. And, while one could make the argu­ment that com­pe­ti­tions like this help spread aware­ness about com­puter secu­rity, I’d argue that they don’t. Here’s why.

The prob­lem with com­pe­ti­tions like this is that the tech media, and the hordes of mouth breath­ing com­menters / forum retards never seem to take away the impor­tant mes­sage. Instead we usu­ally get breath­less hyper­bole (note, I’m specif­i­cally not accus­ing Macworld of that. I linked to them because they were the first story about this that I had open).

Whenever one of these sto­ries breaks, you can be assured that the bulk of the responses will gen­er­ally fall into one of two buckets.

The MacMacs will inevitably come

Continue read­ing Jimmy Crack Mac and I Don’t Care


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Security: The Most Powerful FUD of All.

June 2nd, 2008, by The Angry Drunk

This is sure to bring out the trolls and zealots; but what the hell. It seems that Microsoft has issued a warn­ing advis­ing that Windows users not use Safari for Windows. I’m not going to bother to go over the back­ground on this, you can read the advi­sory your­self here. And I’m not going to dwell on the irony of Microsoft lec­tur­ing any­one on “‘secu­rity.” My point is that this is the new face of FUD. Users have been so cowed with breath­less report­ing about all the evil hack­ers out there in the dan­ger­ous back alleys of the inter­tubes that the most effi­cient way of sab­o­tag­ing your com­pe­ti­tion is to throw out some vague warn­ings about “exploits,” or “hacks.”

Now, before the usual douchebags sally forth to accuse me of defend­ing Apple or some such shit, that’s not what this is about. What I’m com­ment­ing on here is a prac­tice that is as retarded when Apple does is as it is when Microsoft, or Mozilla, or PayPal does it. Computer secu­rity is a real issue, and needs a real con­ver­sa­tion that isn’t just one com­pany using it as a mar­ket­ing trick to dis­credit the com­pe­ti­tion, or a vendor

Continue read­ing Security: The Most Powerful FUD of All.


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