This isn’t anything significant, or worth much of your attention, or even Mac-related. It’s just so damned Twilight Zone-ish I felt compelled to mention it here.

I’m just amazed at the inherent paradox and Escher-loop oddness of this particular torrent I found this morning on Mininova – it’s the one that says “FAKE, DO NOT DOWNLOAD”, if you can read it. Apparently this one is so fake it’s even 706mb big.

So what the heck is it supposed to be? What is it a fake version of? Do I have to download it to find out? But it clearly says do NOT download. And what could it be that it’s even over 700mb? A movie? An app? Do I let my curiosity override the obvious warning? If it’s not supposed to be downloaded then why even put up the damned torrent? Or is it some trick, some double-blind guessing game that would reward the overly curious or the overly dumb? Or is it an obvious prank or trap, something to drive someone like me who had to come to work extremely early because of the car coding ban and has nothing better to do than idly surf while waiting for the rest of the office to come in stir-crazy?

Clearly there’s already one crazy leecher getting the thing. Do I succumb too and join in? Make it a party?

Pwe.

And don’t get me started on the ones just below it – “VIRUS”?

If you’re sick of looking at your iChat window day-in and day-out, give it an overhaul and make it look more like iTunes with this free app called iChat Borderless. It replaces four .nib files in Resources in the iChat folder. Currently works with English OS X installs only. Doesn’t really do much, but it’s easy on the eyes. Grab it here.

Like any homebrewed app, backup your original nib files before you install this one, just in case. Once again, MacADoodle isn’t responsible for any problems you may encounter in the course of your endless tweaking; you’re on your own, kids, so be careful.

Apparently, those who have extra disposable income can now buy gold iPods. The similarity to an actual gold ingot is incredible.

Now I’ve seen everything.

Available from Amosu. P28.8T for a 30gb iPod video, P38.4T for an 80gb.

I love my shuffle. If I could afford it I’d buy one in every color. Except maybe the pink one.

My problem with it is that being such a tiny little thing, it can’t play with its regular dockable cousins’s toys; the shuffle connector uses a dock-let for charging and syncing, with a little proprietary jack sticking out, and whole thing has its own USB cord. You can’t use any of the gazillion accessories made for the dockable iPod big boys. You’re pretty much stuck with what comes in the shuffle box.

Well, it seems the nice folk over at Griffin Technology love the iPod shuffle more than I do, because they made a fantastic little thing that makes me love Griffin more than I already do. They made a Dock Adapter for the shuffle!

It’s a little plastic thing that you set into the receptacle of a regular dock-enabled accessory, then you just slot in the shuffle onto it. Simple and ingenious, really. And it features a little switch that shifts you from audio playback to charge/sync depending on your need. Now the wide, wonderful world of iPod accessories is open to shuffle users.

Imagine an Apple iPod Hi-Fi speaker fitted with this thing; the shuffle will look like an insignificant little nubbin on top of this thing as it feeds the big monster speaker with audio. Niiice.

The Dock Adapter costs $19.99 and will be available at the end of May, but you can pre-order now from the Griffin website. Methinks I’ll get one.

A security researcher sent instructions to a security engineer on a zero-day vulnerability in Safari and together worked for 9 hours on an exploit to hack into a Macbook at a hack-a-Mac contest the engineer had joined.

Dino Dai Zovi, a security researcher who has found flaws in Mac software in the past, fed info to Shane Macaulay, a security engineer who had joined the two-day “PWN To Own” Mac-hacking contest at the CanSecWest Security Conference at Vancouver yesterday, to win one of two MacBooks that were being given to the first people who can hack into them. The Macs were current and up-to-date with all security patches, but had no special security software on them outside of what came with OS X.

On April 20, the second day of the contest, the rules were relaxed after no one was able to do it the day before, and Macaulay was able to hack into one of the Macbooks using Dai Zovi’s help. The hack was accomplished by having a CanSecWest organizer surf to a malicious website using Safari, upon which they used the zero-day security hole in the browser, a tactic familiar to Windows hackers. Macaulay is now the proud owner of the Macbook he hacked.

This comes (coincidentally?) on the heels of the release of the new Security Update from Apple the day before the hack.