John Gruber will not let this MacBook WiFi hack thing die. Good on him. Too many people accepted it before vetting it.
Rich Mogull makes several good points in his criticism of my challenge, and continues to present the most reasonable and cogent defense of Maynor/Ellch/SecureWorks that I’ve seen — but it mostly seems to boil down to arguing that a stunt like this is not a fair way to conduct a technical argument. But of course it wasn’t fair — the unfairness was the entire point of the challenge. I tried the fair and balanced route when I published “The Curious Case of the Supposed MacBook Wi-Fi Hack”, and in response received no answers.
Sometimes it’s only effective to fight fire with fire, and make no bones about it, Maynor and Ellch’s MacBook exploit demonstration video from the Black Hat conference was a cheap stunt. The cheap counter-stunt of this challenge was clearly far more effective at bringing attention to the problems and unanswered questions raised by their initial presentation and announcement than my exhaustive analysis was.
Go read the rest now. Maynor and Ellch are frauds, as far as I’m concerned. If they weren’t, this would’ve been over weeks ago.
Technorati Tags: maynor, ellch, secureworks, macbook, wifi, fraud
