The Null Device

2010/3/26

The New York April Fools' Committee is proud to announce New York's 25th annual April Fool's Day parade:

The theme for this year's parade is "Up, Up and Away." Led by Grand Marshall Ben Bernanke, the parade will kick off with the Where's-the-Money Marching Band playing this year's theme song by the Fifth Dimension "Up, Up and Away in My Beautiful Balloon." Color commentary will be provided by Sarah Palin for her new Fox TV show "We Make It Up, You Believe It." Thanks to a contribution by a secret donor in honor of the parade's 25th anniversary, 10,000 red, white and blue helium balloons, each with a crisp one-dollar bill attached, will be released along the parade route.
The floats this year will be led by Richard and Mayumi Heene with their Homemade Helium Flying Saucer Float. Next will be the Northwest Airlines Flight 188 "Siesta" Cockpit Float with pilot Timothy B. Cheney and first officer Richard I. Cole napping. Then a North Korea Missile Launch Float will launch H2O bombs into the crowd.
The New York April Fools' Day Parade was created in 1986 to remedy a glaring omission in the long list of New York's annual ethnic and holiday parades. These events fail to recognize the importance of April 1st, the day designated to commemorate the perennial folly of mankind. In an attempt to bridge this gap and bring people back in touch with their inherent foolishness, the parade annually crowns a King of Fools from parading look-alikes.
Those wanting more information are urged to contact the committee chair, Joey Skaggs.

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Recently, the annual Pwn2Own contest took place; in it, participants try to take over a computer by exploiting security holes in a web browser, and capture the flag (in this case, a file on the computer's hard drive). This year, all the browsers but one fell; Firefox 3.6.2 (though it's not clear whether NoScript would have mitigated this), IE8 and Safari all fell; one of the hackers even pwned an (un-jailbroken) iPhone and made off with the SMS database. The one browser that remained standing: Google Chrome, not because it's bug-free, but because the sandbox mechanism makes exploiting bugs impractical:

"There are bugs in Chrome but they're very hard to exploit. I have a Chrome vulnerability right now but I don't know how to exploit it. It's really hard. They've got that sandbox model that's hard to get out of. With Chrome, it's a combination of things - you can't execute on the heap, the OS protections in Windows and the Sandbox."

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