In Through The Out Door

Technology Rewriting the Rules of Business:Fortune magazine is running a story describing the overthrow of Jack Welch’s old rules of business. (Welch responds here.) Although the article lists Google and Apple as two paragons of the new rules of business, it fails to note that the old rules of business originated from straight manufacturing firms while the new rules of business are coming from the (more service-oriented) tech sector.“ From the article: ”Steve Jobs has emphasized that Apple hires only people who are passionate about what they do (something that, to be fair, Welch also talked about). At Genentech, CEO Art Levinson says he actually screens out job applicants who ask too many questions about titles and options, because he wants only people who are driven to make drugs that help patients fight cancer.

Windows Rootkit Wars Escalate:An anonymous reader writes “The rootkit wars have started to escalate with a rootkit named Rustock which is able to remain hidden from all the popular anti-rootkit tools. It uses some new techniques including not only putting itself in a ADS (NTFS alternate data stream) which isn’t seen by normal file system enumeration tools, but even blocks ADS aware tools from seeing the stream. Works in Vista, too! Analysis in both Symantec and F-Secure blogs.”

Parallels Desktop for OS X Reviewed:phaedo00 writes “Ars Technica has put up a great review of the first full release of Parallels’ virtualization software for OS X, Parallels Desktop 1.0. From the article: ‘Move over emulation, virtualization is in and it’s hotter than two Jessica Albas wresting the devil himself in a pit of molten steel. It’s no contest, virtualization has it all: multiple operating systems running on the same machine at nearly the full speed of the host’s processor with each system seamlessly networking with the next. Add to that the fact that it’s cheaper than getting a new machine and you have the guaranteed latest craze. Not even the Hula Hoop can stop this one.’”

Navy Probes Data Leak On 100,000 Sailors, Marines:

DoD releases OTD Roadmap:The Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) has announced the release of a Department of Defense (DoD) report entitled the Open Technology Development Roadmap which focuses on how to make the use of open technology development an integral part of the Department of Defense (DoD) software acquisition and development processes.

The Ten Most Beautiful OS X Apps:As someone in the Macintosh shareware business, as part of my job, I make the daily crawl through MacUpdate to look for the latest and greatest in Mac software. One thing I’ve been noticing recently is a renaissance of extremely polished and beautiful Mac apps, so I thought I’d share some of these finds with you guys. Without further ado, presenting the top ten most beautiful OS X apps. Hopefully you’ll find some new gems in there, even I found a few surprises while compiling this list. Enjoy!

Security company gives Mac a boost:In the just released Sophos Security Threat Management Report (requires registration), the dominant cybersecurity threat is from Trojans, which the report said outnumber viruses and worms by 4:1, compared to 2:1 a year ago. In light of the Trojan horses and the dominance of Windows-based threats,  Sophos suggests that home users should consider purchasing a [...]

In this attack, you can seize control of someone’s computer using his WiFi interface, even if he’s not connected to a network.The two researchers used an open-source 802.11 hacking tool called LORCON (Loss of Radio Connectivity) to throw an extremely large number of wireless packets at different wireless cards. Hackers use this technique, called fuzzing, to see if they can cause programs to fail, or perhaps even run unauthorized software when they are bombarded with unexpected data. Using tools like LORCON, Maynor and Ellch were able to discover many examples of wireless device driver flaws, including one that allowed them to take over a laptop by exploiting a bug in an 802.11 wireless driver. They also examined other networking technologies including Bluetooth, Ev-Do (EVolution-Data Only), and HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access).No details yet. The researchers are presenting their results at BlackHat on August 2.

Infocus: Basic journey of a packet:

Basic journey of a packet

Want Security? Make The Switch:Security firm Sophos Security has released a report claiming that Macs will be more secure than Windows for some time to come. The report listed the 10 most common kinds of malware, and noted that they can only infect Windows systems.

Apple to Unveil New Leopard OS in August:Looks like Apple is going to reveal its new cool and fast Mac OS code-named ‘Leopard’ in the upcoming World Developer’s Conference in August. Good news for Apple! And terrible news for Microsoft. If ‘Leopard’ is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient, in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista, we certainly would see Apple’s remarkable market share gain next year.“