Interesting news out of a security conference in Western Canada. Apparently someone has actually hacked a Macbook through a zero-day security hole. Yes, we could insert lots of cheering and posturing on behalf of Micrsofies everywhere. While I don’t pretend to be a security expert, from what I read it looks like we should temper our feelings of schadenfreude with the following facts:

1. the rules had to be relaxed before the hack was made — because no one was able to accomplish it with the prior set of rules

2. the hack doesn’t grant root access

3. the hack exploited vulnerability in Safari, not OS X

Furthermore, while the contestant won himself a free macbook, the facts remain: although there are only a tiny percentage of macs that comprise the world’s computer market, this still represents millions of PCs. Millions of PCs where there hasn’t yet been a major, real, publicized security breach.

I might be critical of Apple, but it looks like there are some legitimate caveats to this “Apple Hax0r’d FTW!”