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Major tech pubs put out their Snow Leopard reviews last night, and they’re all predictably positive. Snow Leopard offers lots of small and subtle improvements to your Mac plus gets speed boosts out of even older hardware for an affordable $30. Here’s the rundown of reviews seen so far:

• Gizmodo: Snow Leopard Review: Lightened and Enlightened–lots of great charts here demonstrating SL’s speed increases doing various common tasks on your Mac
• The New York Times’ David Pogue: Apple’s Sleek Upgrade
• Walt Mossberg: Apple Changes Leopard’s Spots
• Macworld: Snow Leopard Review

Even though Apple suggests Mac users without Leopard buy the $169 Mac box set to get Snow Leopard, anyone can purchase the $29 Snow Leopard disc and install it. This means the Snow Leopard DVD isn’t an “upgrade” at all, it’s the full-on Mac OS X operating system for 30 bucks, $100 cheaper than Leopard was. I suspected this was the case, since it is with the developer build I’m running, but The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg confirms it’s true for the final release as well:

For owners of Intel-based Macs who are still using the older Tiger version of the Mac OS, Apple is officially making Snow Leopard available only in a “boxed set” that includes other software and costs $169. The reasoning is that these folks never paid the $129 back in 2007 to upgrade to Leopard. But here’s a tip: Apple concedes that the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade will work properly on these Tiger-equipped Macs, so you can save the extra $140.

So if you’re jumping from Tiger to Snow Leopard, you saved $129 bucks never purchasing Leopard and you can save $140 skipping the box set. Guess being a late adopter does pay off.

Check out Amazon for the $29 Snow Leopard disc.

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.

Miller cracked Safari running on a fully patched installation of Mac OS X on a MacBook. The details of the exploit will not be given out until Apple has published a patch to ensure that others don’t run with the exploit and abuse it. This is the second year in a row that Safari on the Mac is the first to fall in the PWN2OWN contest, again by Miller’s hands.

A while after, Internet Explorer 8, running on Windows 7, also fell. Windows 7 was running on a Sony Vaio P, and was cracked by a cracker named Nils, who wishes to remain anonymous. He also won a cash prize and got to keep the Vaio P. Several Microsoft security folk were on sight to witness the exploit. This exploit is also kept under wraps until Microsoft releases a patch. Later on, Nils also broke into Safari (Mac) and Firefox.

All the cracks happened on day one of the contest, which means the operating systems and browsers were fully patched, with no additional plugins loaded. So far, only Chrome hasn’t been cracked yet, but that probably won’t take long, seeing how quick the first browsers were exploited.

Still on the table… this year’s contest will also offer a $10,000 prize for every vulnerability successfully exploited in Windows Mobile, Android, Symbian, and the iPhone and BlackBerry OSes. The competition runs through Friday… so it ain’t over yet.

CanSecWest PWN2OWN

Proving itself a staggering 42 times faster at rendering JavaScript than IE 7, our benchmarks confirm Apple’s Safari 4 browser, released in beta Tuesday, is the fastest browser on the planet. In fact, it beat Google’s Chrome, Firefox 3, Opera 9.6 and even Mozilla’s developmental Minefield browser. ZDNET used the SunSpider suite of JavaScript tests to determine which browser was the quickest, and the Safari 4 beat every browser in terms of speed, on both a PC running Windows XP SP2, and a Mac running OS X 10.6 with all updates applied.

Below are the actual figures if you want to see how all seven browsers scored against each other, but for quick reference we determined on a PC that Safari was a whopping 42 times faster than Internet Explorer 7, just over six times faster than Internet Explorer 8, 3.5 times faster than Firefox 3, and 1.2 times faster than Google Chrome. Here’s Safari versus the rest, excluding IE 7:

Read the rest of this entry »

Want to give OS X a whirl but aren’t willing to shell out for Apple hardware? BoingBoing has a compatibility chart with links to how to install it on the individual netbooks. The short answer: get an MSI Wind, Lenovo S10, Dell Mini 9 or HP Mini 1000. (Gizmodo has an excellent how-to for the Mini 9). It will run on other hardware though. I’ve personal got an Asus 1000… and I’m dying to give this a shot.

Hop on over and check out their check for netbooks at Mac OS X Netbook Compatibility Chart. For those interested, the chart isn’t totally up today. If you own one of the netbooks listed click on through. I discovered that there are additional updates on the Eeepc 1000H that allow it more funcationality than listed in the chart.

KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. So you only have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish).

Keepass comes in a portable version, perfect for keeping on a USB thumbdrive. The password database consists of only one file that can be transferred from one computer to another easily.

Keepass is open source and totally free (released under the GPL).  Version 2.x (the latest) runs on Windows 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, Mono (Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, …), the only requirement being that you have Microsoft .NET Framework ? 2.0 or Mono ? 2.0.1. It allows for exporting to XML, HTML, CSV, KDB3, XSL-Transformed, and importing from more than 25 different formats. KeePass 2.x already has built-in support for file synchronization and because it has a plugin architecture which allows others to extend the application you can also download a plugin to synchronize with online storage providers!

KeePass supports the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES, Rijndael) and the Twofish algorithms to encrypt its password databases, this is the same type of encryption used by banks and the government, so you know your data is safe.

Grab a copy of Keepass from keepass.info.