It was easy to find fault with the coverage and hacker worship that accompanied a recent exploit-writing contest held at a security conference, but it was tough to decide on a title for this post. A few came to mind, such as the following:

• News flash: Computer users can hurt themselves!
• Warning: Hackers can pwn boxes to which they have physical access!
• Amazing! Computers can do things quickly!

Two individuals are receiving accolades because they wrote code that exploits a very old attack vector and received laptop computers as a reward. The code is new but the story is old.

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