As he had already predicted, cracker Charlie Miller has won the PWN2OWN contest by cracking Safari and Mac OS X within seconds of the start of the competition. "It took a couple of seconds. They clicked on the link and I took control of the machine," Miller said after his accomplishment. He took home the USD 10000 prize, as well as the MacBook he performed the exploit on. Internet Explorer 8 fell a while later by cracker Nils, who also cracked Safari and Firefox after being done with IE8.

Details are sparse, but Intel has let out word of a spiffy new graphics accelerator designed for mobile devices. This SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) accelerator renders graphics more efficiently than any other available component in that it renders them faster and at higher quality and-- here's the kicker-- it consumes ten times less energy than similar available components, providing longer battery life. Again, there's not much to go on at the moment, but Intel says that these lovely little buggers will definitely be showing up in future mobile devices be they MIDs, UMPCs, or netbooks.

Lawsuit or not, Psystar has just added a new desktop with Mac OS X pre-installed to its line up, the Open(3). The mini-ATX computer comes in at USD 599, and packs a Core 2 Duo at 2.8Ghz, 2GB of DDR2 800Mhz RAM, a GeForce 8400GS 256MB graphics card, and Leopard pre-installed. Various options are also available. The company has also stated it is working on a laptop with Mac OS X pre-installed.

"As expected, Silverlight 3 was announced today at MIX09, this year's iteration of Microsoft's annual conference for web developers, designers, and enthusiasts. While the keynote that just finished was full of little announcements that were handed out faster than the audience could swallow them, the one that stood out the most was the third iteration of Microsoft's Flash alternative, Silverlight. Links for the first and last beta of Silverlight 3, and the many development tools surrounding it, went live earlier today."

I'm not often wowed by a computer's design, probably because most of them appear to be designed by people with no sense of style and class whatsoever. The only (relatively) recent examples of decent design that I personally find to have a "wow factor" are Apple's MacBook Air and the PowerMac Cube from the same company. Yesterday, however, I was wowed again by a product from a company you wouldn't expect it from: Dell.

If you don't want to commit to the idiosyncrasies of a specific shell running on a particular platform, try the Squirrel Shell. The Squirrel Shell provides an advanced, object-oriented scripting language that works equally well on UNIX, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows systems. Write a script once, and run it anywhere.

PureMobile sent us in the Nokia N79 for a quick spin. This is one of the latest Symbian phones out there, running the latest non-touchscreen version of the S60 operating environment, version 3.2.

In addition to the Chrome 2.0 beta, work for the Linux version of Chrome is on its way. Its official name is currently "Chromium," and Google Chrome for Linux doesn't officially exist yet. For the sake of argument, however, Google Chrome for Linux is on its way whether it's currently in a Chromium and pre-alpha state or not, and now Ubuntu users can get a hold of Chromium to take for a spin. In this article, learn how to install the current build of Chromium to test on your Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based system and see several screenshots of the budding browser.

"A number of folks have asked me what tools and techniques I use to reverse engineer Cocoa executables. I thought it would be worth taking some time out from documenting undocumented APIs to show you how easy it is to do the same thing for yourself. With all these tools in your arsenal, reverse engineering Cocoa executables is actually very simple. In fact, it's a good deal more straightforward than most Windows executables, with the exception of Delphi and .NET where - like Cocoa - a good deal of runtime type information is contained within the executable."

Apple held an event today announcing some of the new features coming in iPhone OS v3. Thee were loads and loads of new features, but the big ones are cut/copy/paste functionality, push notifications (I guess most developers will believe it when they finally see it), spotlight search, and many others.

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is one of the most important technologies in the graphics arena. Since Flex inherits most of its features from Flash, it has very good support for vector drawing. This article introduces you to the fascinating world of SVG in Flex. It teaches you how to create custom graphics and build appealing flashy components just by vector drawing.

These 5 articles on PHP frameworks will get you quickly familiar with Zend, symfony, and CakePHP. This series is designed for PHP developers who want to start using a PHP framework, but have not examined the available frameworks in detail. You will examine their similarities and differences while building and extending a sample application using Ajax and by integrating external tasks.

Recently, I learned that there are two types of zombies. You have the undead ones, that have arisen from the grave, probably a little disappointed in the afterlife, and who come back to eat your brain (which indicates that the afterlife really must suck if it compares unfavourably to eating brains). Then there's the virus type of zombie, you know, from Resident Evil and 28 Days Later. Left 4 Dead sports the latter variety, but really, does anyone even care? Zombie mayhem!

Hadoop, the same software that lies at the heart of successful companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and others, has been proven time and again with said companies to be a successful data management server, keeping data secure and fault-free spread across multiple servers. It isn't the easiest piece of software to configure, however, which is why the Cloudera company has just announced a freely downloadable and easier to use custom distribution of Hadoop to bring the power of entities like Google to smaller businesses.