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Wednesday, January 1st, 2014

    Time Event
    7:05p
    The Mac Pro review
    All in all the new Mac Pro is a good update to its aging predecessor. Apple did a great job with the new chassis and build a desktop that's extremely dense with compute. When I had to dust off the old Mac Pros to prepare them for this comparison I quickly remembered many of the reasons that frustrated me about the platform. The old Mac Pro was big, bulky, a pain to work on and was substantially behind the consumer Macs in single threaded performance. The new Mac Pro fixes literally all of that. If you have a workload that justifies it and prefer OS X, the Mac Pro is thankfully no longer just your only solution, it's a great solution. The only Mac Pro review that matters. Still want one. Won't buy one - but want one.
    7:11p
    On hacking microSD cards
    Remember when I wrote about how your mobile phone runs two operating systems, one of which is a black box we know and understand little about, ripe for vulnerabilities? As many rightfully pointed out in the comments - it's not just mobile phones that have tiny processors for specific tasks embedded in them. As it turns out, memory cards have microprocessors though - and yes, they can be cracked for remote code execution too. Today at the Chaos Computer Congress (30C3), xobs and I disclosed a finding that some SD cards contain vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code execution - on the memory card itself. On the dark side, code execution on the memory card enables a class of MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks, where the card seems to be behaving one way, but in fact it does something else. On the light side, it also enables the possibility for hardware enthusiasts to gain access to a very cheap and ubiquitous source of microcontrollers. There's so much computing power hidden in the dark.

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