Two days have been past since Pwn2Own 2011 contest is live. On the first day, Hackers successfully managed to hack Apple’s Safari 5.0.3 on fully patched Mac OS X 10.6.6 and Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 SP1 64-bit machine.
Apple and Google released last-minute patches prior to the event. Google’s Chrome browser has been update to v10, while Apple released 50+ patches for various softwares including Safari and iOS 4.3.
Apple’s Safari was hacked by French security company Vupen who walked off with $15,000 and a new MacBook Air. They managed to exploit an unpatched vulnerability in Safari in just 5 seconds.
Meanwhile, IE8 was exploited by Stephen Fewer, who used three separate vulnerabilities to get out of Protected Mode and crack that browser’s best locks. It’s hard to exploit IE8 since Microsoft uses ASLR and a strong Sandbox. Even though, Stephen managed to hack it flawlessly.
But still, Google Chrome and Firefox have not been broken down. There’s still 1 more day remaining for the contest. Let’s see if these 2 browsers can be hacked.
When compared to other browsers, Apple boasts that Safari 4’s JavaScript is up to eight times faster than IE 8 and more than four times faster than Firefox 3; and Safari 4 loads HTML web pages more than three times faster than IE 8 and three times faster than Firefox 3.
Safari 4 includes HTML 5 support for offline technologies and support for advanced CSS Effects. Apple at the WWDC was also proud to point out that Safari 4 is the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test.
Safari is built off of WebKit, which is the open source browser engine that’s also used by popular mobile browsers and even Google’s Chrome. It’s interesting that Apple chose to compare Safari 4 against IE8 and Firefox 3, but left out comparisons with Chrome 2.
A Los Angeles real estate developer is suing Apple for patent infringement over the way the iPhone navigates Web sites. The suit, which was filed on behalf of EMG Technology, seeks unspecified damages.
EMG Technology is a company that holds the patents of Elliot Gottfurcht, the real estate developer, as well as Marlo Longstreet and Grant Gottfurcht. The company claims that the iPhone infringes on patent 7, 441, 196- a patent that was approved only last month, after a filing process that began on March 13, 2006.
That patent is for an invention that displays “on-line content reformatted from a webpage in a hypertext markup language (HTML) format into an extensible markup language (XML) format to generate a sister site.” This sister site is a simplified version of the original site that is then displayed on any number of devices–including cell phones, EMG says.
Now, it seems to me that this is a description of what every single mobile phone on the market does. Every mobile phone EXCEPT the iPhone, that is. Remember all those commercials touting how the iPhone doesn’t display a simplified Web site, but the full Web page?
The press release issued by EMG claims that the iPhone uses the same method as their invention. So, doesn’t every other mobile phone do this as well? Should a patent granted last month hand over intellectual property rights for every single handheld device that accesses the Web?
