The Story of a Simple and Dangerous OS X Kernel Bug 230
Posted
by
timothy
from the chink-in-the-armor dept.
from the chink-in-the-armor dept.
RazvanM writes "At the beginning of this month the Mac OS X 10.5.8 closed a kernel vulnerability that lasted more than 4 years, covering all the 10.4 and (almost all) 10.5 Mac OS X releases. This article presents some twitter-size programs that trigger the bug. The mechanics are so simple that can be easily explained to anybody possessing some minimal knowledge about how operating systems works. Beside being a good educational example this is also a scary proof that very mature code can still be vulnerable in rather unsophisticated ways."
But it's not Windows! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Age is irrelevant, resistance is futile. (Score:5, Funny)
Well... I think that depends a lot on the reason why it's old code. I've met my share of code with the warning "There be dragons!".
Oh god (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, I get libraries of congress and olympic-sized swimming pools, but twitter is a new one. Is it used for measuring how long a program is or how pointless it is?
Re:I'm a Mac (Score:5, Funny)
So this means we can take those idiotic commercials off the air, right?
When there's as much malware for OS X as there is for Windows, sure.
Okay, I'll make it easy. When there is a tenth as much malware for OS X as there is for Windows, sure.
Hmmm, this isn't working. When there's a hundredth as much ... um, no, that doesn't work either.
A thousandth -- no, damn.
You get the idea. Or maybe you don't.
Re:Oh god (Score:1, Funny)
You forgot 'or how dangerous it is?'.
Re:Oh god (Score:5, Funny)
The comparison was simply to (successfully) annoy those of us who are /still/ ignoring everything we can about twitter. I briefly considered checking wikipedia to see how small that was, but there were some kids on my lawn.
Re:4 fscking years (Score:4, Funny)
Oh look, I think it's trying to communicate, perhaps we can find a translator. Does anyone speak yiddiotish?
Re:But it's not Windows! (Score:5, Funny)
You know, at this point there are probably about a thousand times as many people whining about this supposed attitude on the part of Mac users than there are Mac users actually displaying it.
But that's perfectly in order, isn't it? There have been many more people complaining that Hitler was a bad guy than there has been Hitlers.
(*knock, knock*
- Who's there?
- Godwin.)
Re:But it's not Windows! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But it's not Windows! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But it's not Windows! (Score:4, Funny)
So was I! But my Mac crashed in the middle of my post so someone else beat me to it while I waited for Windows to boot!
So it took Windows over 10 hours to boot?