Gone in 2 minutes: Mac gets hacked first in contest

Posted: 30 Mar 2008 05:31 PM CDT

It may be the quickest $10,000 Charlie Miller ever earned.

He took the first of three laptop computers — and a $10,000 cash prize — Thursday after breaking into a MacBook Air at the CanSecWest security conference’s PWN 2 OWN hacking contest.

Show organizers offered a Sony Vaio, Fujitsu U810 and the MacBook as prizes, saying that they could be won by anybody at the show who could find a way to hack into each of them and read the contents of a file on the system, using a previously undisclosed “0day” attack.

—————

Legal battle over Warcraft ‘bot’

Posted: 30 Mar 2008 05:31 PM CDT

The makers of World of Warcraft are locked in a legal battle with a firm that has produced a tool to automate many actions in the virtual world.

Blizzard is suing Michael Donnelly, the creator of the MMO Glider program, which performs key tasks in the game automatically, such as fighting.

Both sides have submitted legal summaries to a court in Arizona.

——————-

IBM Takes Stake in Open Source Database Vendor

Posted: 30 Mar 2008 05:31 PM CDT

For more than a decade, PostgreSQL has been a cornerstone of the open source database market. In recent years, EnterpriseDB has emerged as a leading vendor supporting and driving PostgreSQL forward.

It will now continue its efforts thanks in part from a little help from IBM (NYSE: IBM). EnterpriseDB is also re-branding and expanding its PostgreSQL efforts to take even more direct aim at its rival MySQL on the open source side and Oracle on the proprietary side.