George Ou Jizzes His Pants

George Ou is so excited about the “zero day” AirPort exploit released today that, shockingly, he’s gotten important facts wrong, even after they were spelled out for him in detail:

According to Brian Krebs, Apple’s Lynn Fox told him that “This issue affects a small percentage of previous generation AirPort enabled Macs and does not affect currently shipping or AirPort Extreme enabled Macs.” But the flaw affects all “Airport enabled Macs” which are the PowerPC based Macs that comprise roughly half of the Mac market. The “AirPort Extreme enabled Macs” are the newer Intel based Macs.

Wrong. “AirPort Extreme” is Apple’s marketing name for the IEEE 802.11g 54 Mbps wireless networking protocol. They’ve been using it since January 2003, long before the switch to Intel processors earlier this year. “AirPort”, which is what today’s exploit attacks, is Apple’s marketing name for the older 802.11b 11 Mbps protocol.

So, in short:

  • All Intel-based Macs use AirPort Extreme;
  • All PowerPC Macs sold after 2003 use AirPort Extreme;
  • Today’s exploit attacks regular old non-Extreme AirPort;
  • These facts are all easy to discover for yourself by taking 90 seconds to Google for “AirPort Extreme”;
  • George Ou is a jackass.

★ Wednesday, 1 November 2006