Archive for March 28th, 2008
Quoteth the DVLabs:
At 12:38pm local time, the team of Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff, and Mark Daniel from Independent Security Evaluators have successfully compromised the Apple MacBook Air, winning the laptop and $10,000 from TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative.
Three computers (A Macbook Air, a Vista box and a Ubuntu box) were set up in parallel at a hacker conference in Vancouver to challenge the hackers to have their way with them - with prize money and the boxes up for grabs as each machine gets compromised. The very amusing thing (almost ironic given Apples security claim to fame) was the first box to succumb… Thats right… the Macbook Air…
Being hacked at one of these things isn’t that big a deal; but being hacked before the Vista box went down? Thats got to be hard for the Apple apologists to swallow. I can just see the Mac vs PC parodies springing up on youtube :p
Stay tuned to DVLabs blog though to see who is next to fall out of the remaining Ubuntu and Vista.
read comments (0)
Demo Girl (http://demogirl.com/) has put together a great screencast on website/application user friendliness. I’m currently working on a fairly large web application and usability is one of the key areas that so frequently suffers in web applications - both in part to inexperienced/lazy developers and/or “overly creative” designers.
Quote:
“I sign up and navigate through a lot of different Websites and services every single day so I can create screencasts to help my readers decide if they want to try them out or not. In doing this, I notice every little detail from arriving to the site, to locating my account settings, to signing out. It’s my job to know where the help pages are, how to change a password, and how to generally navigate through whatever site I’m currently creating a screencast for. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve ditched a service that I actually thought was kind of cool, but navigation was so horrible that I didn’t want to share it with you here - And that’s the topic of the screencast today. “
It’s only a few minutes long and well worth taking a look at if you have any influence over the design and development of web applications: if you care about your users experience anyway!