Bad news people, the Crack-a-Mac challenge was successfully hacked, but after downtime of a day and the arrival of a patch for the offending software (not to mention a trip to the bank), Crack-a-Mac is again up and running, and offering another SEK 100,000.
I'm torn between patriotic pride and disappointment. The Hacker was an Australian calling himself "Starfire", who managed to exploit a security hole in Blue World's Web-Star plug-in Lasso. This plug-in allows FileMaker Pro databases to be used in web documents.
What about the clones?
Plenty of rumours are flying around the web that cloning is over.
Apparently this is because Steve Jobs is acting CEO of Apple, and has been quoted as saying the clones are "leeches" who are eating away at Apple's marketshare instead of expanding the Mac market.
The lingering issue of MacOS 8 license agreements and the latest rumour of Apple flatly refusing to certify CHRP computers (basically stopping cloners from selling them) all seem to be adding fuel to the fire.
Personally I'm content to wait for a statement from Apple before I believe these rumours, mainly because Apple has never been subtle about shooting itself in the foot before, and killing the clone market will be exactly that in my opinion.
People like choice, and an Apple only Mac market does not give it to them. Anyway, what's to stop people from buying Wintel machines to run Rhapsody on after Rhapsody is released? It seems to me to be rather short-sighted to kill the clone market.
Some further articles on clones
Macweek's latest article on cloning.
MacUsers latest editorial on the clone issue.
MacAddict news
MacCentral's clone Mandate petition.
New links
I've added some new links and updated the layout in the Mac links section so that it is hopefully easier to use. Please let me know what you think. Also if you have any suggestion for more sites I'd like to here from you, just put them in a discussion posting. By the way some people (O.K, person) has started using the review section in the new Suite101 to review links, if you think I've left out something about a link, review it yourself and give everyone the benefit of your wisdom (or humour, or wit, or experience, or ...).
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