Unfortunately ZDNet had posted an article on this challenge creating a frenzy of people trying to hack this poor Mac Mini all at once. The result was over 4000 SSH login attempts, traffic spiking over 30 Mbps and intermittent DoS attacks amonst a slew of other scans and attacks.

No one was able to get into the Mac from the outside but Dave was handing out local user account to a those who asked and the system was compromised using known local privilege escalation vulnerabilities.

Read more…

Another widget Google released was also long awaited and is quite useful: a Blogger widget. Considering that WordPress and Bloglines have had theirs for a while now, it was a good idea for Google to finally release this tool.

The last widget that Google released is, of course, their search history tool. We’re not sure how this tool integrates with your browser of choice. Perhaps it only works with Safari? It does require you to already have a Google accounts login (i.e. Gmail account) which means that your search history is stored on Google’s servers. This could easily be considered a privacy issue for some (including me), as your searches are being directly attached to your profile.

This seems to be a new trend with Google as their new Google Desktop 3 software has an optional remote searching capability that allows you to search you remote systems via the web for files, emails, pics, etc… If this feature is turned on you are actually allowing Google to index and cache that information on their own servers (for a limited time). This had brought out a lot of press at the time of release, some good and some bad, even though this “feature” is controlled by the end-user.

You can find out more info regarding these widgets in Google Groups.