Unbelievable
Posted September 26, 2006
By The Macalope
Daring Fireball deconstructs Kieran McCarthy’s short piece on the wireless controversy, which sets a new standard for how wrong per inch someone can be.
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What never ceases to amaze me about the Mac community is that we are so interconnected that things that would go unnoticed by the Windows community turn into a fiasco like this. Name a time when a Windows exploit (just one) with no evidence of being practically exploitable and no examples of it’s use in the wild caused peoples reputations to be put on the line. Apple can’t afford to have us vulnerable to exploits, the backlash from the community would be huge.
The thing is, it’s not that there was an exploit. We all expect there will be exploits, and that Apple must patch them speedily.
It’s that this group claimed an exploit, provided nothing specific, showed a demo using a system that just wouldn’t exist in any environment (using 3rd party wireless when the machine has built-in wireless), claimed Apple was leaning on them to hush it up, made all sorts of insults and then refused to provide any real substantive proof beyond “because we said so.”
If they’d been clear and up-front, everyone would be on their side.
It’s like these bozos concocted the perfect storm of shit, and then went about delivering said shitstorm to us, piece by piece until no impartial observer could fail to clearly see that these guys have never had any experience whatsoever in anything professional.
I’m continually amazed by the sheer naivete displayed by SecureWorks, and the incredible bias displayed by some bloggers claiming “journalist” status.
Geogre Ou in particular, I’m not that upset with the original blogger Brian Krebs. Besides initially being woefully incompetent, he has been good about keeping his head out of the “shit storm” since then. Ou on the other hand, blathering idiot trying to get attention.
Well, Krebs isn’t an innocent party here; he ingnited the original firestorm by his blog entries that claimed that the built-in wireless card in the MacBook was vulnerable, too. Since Mayner and Ellch have since stopped talking to him, many have assumed that he probabl;y should not have made that claim. He also has claimed to have seen a hack of the native card, and has not shown any coroboration of that claim, either.
You’re right, he has mostly kept out of the storm, although his recent blog about Apple’s patches in which he got totally confused about not only which Apple systems were affected, but also as to how many patches were released, has led many to claim vindication of their claims that he really isn’t that technically competant.
I don’t know if I would go quite THAT far; his entry today about the identity theft stuff sounded pretty good, but he certainly seemed out of his depth in the “60 seconds” hack. He never did really ask the hard questions. It was almost as if he had fallen victim to the Dan Rather error of Wanting It To Be True.
Bad mojo for sure.