Apple Mac HQ

In a somewhat surprising announcement, David Watanabe has announced that Inquisitor, his search extension for Safari, has been acquired by Yahoo. This announcement was made simultaneously with the release of Inquisitor 3.1. Among the changes in Inquisitor 3.1 is the default search engine for new users is now set to Yahoo (it was previously Google).

Details on the acquisition are a little scarce. No word on the acquisition price or other details. What is known is that Watanabe will not join Yahoo, but will remain the lead developer of Inquisitor.

So what’s in this for Yahoo? I suspect the acquisition is just an attempt to buy search queries. The search box in Safari is powered by Google. If you install Inquisitor, the search box now defaults to Yahoo. Yahoo is paying for your searches.

Disclosure: I own a small number of Yahoo shares.

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A new 0day vulnerability was recently discovered in Safari at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, Canada. Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff, and Mark Daniel of Independent Security Evaluators were able to gain control of a MacBook Air on the second day of the hacking competition. In addition to trying to Hack OS X, teams were also trying to hack Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux. The Macbook Air was the first of the three systems to be hacked.

The hacking contest began Wednesday where hacks were limited to over the network techniques. On that first day, no computers were hacked. It wasn’t until the second day when the Macbook Air was hacked in less than two minutes. On the second day, the rules were changed to allow attacks delivered via a website or email.

The vulnerability in Safari involved having the judges browse to a website with the malicious code installed. Once the judges visited the website, the team was able to retrieve a file from the Macbook Air.

The ISE team immediately signed a nondisclosure agreement relating to the vulnerability. TippingPoint, the contest sponsor, said Apple has been informed of the vulnerability. Last year’s contest was won by a QuickTime vulnerability, which was patched by Apple within two weeks. No word on what version of Safari was used in the attack.

[Via CNET]

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If you’re reading this blog, chances are pretty good that you have installed more than one web browser on your Mac. I personally have four web browsers installed, Safari, Camino, Firefox, and Shiira. Using these browsers is easy, but how do you set or reset the default browser? The first place a beginner would logically look is System Preferences. You won’t find an option to set the default browser in System Preferences though.

To set the default browser you actually have to open Safari. Open Safari and click on Safari and then Preferences. Once you are in preferences, click on the General button. The first option you see should look like the below. Choose your browser from the list or click Select if the browser you want isn’t listed. Now that you know how to select your default browser, go out and try a new one.

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