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ZDNet can't look up APE...
ZDNet's Tom Espiner just posted an article titled Apple guru combats month of bugs, where they mention that Landon Fuller is trying to fix the security bugs as Kevin Finisterre and LMH are reporting them during their Month of Apple Bugs.
I congratulate and thank Landon, and encourage anyone who's good at reverse engineering and tracking down bugs in other people's code to help him.
But ZDNet apparently can't be bothered to look up even a little info on an application used to fix one of those bugs, instead just guessing their way through:
Fuller published a fix on Tuesday for the QuickTime vulnerability which uses Application Enhancer, a piece of software designed to improve how applications behave when running on systems.
Application Enhancer may be more well known by its shorthand name, APE, and what it actually does is not improve how applications behave, but rather it allows injecting code into other applications to patch them, i.e. replace or extend their code with someone else's. Now, if I was in a conciliatory mood, I'd say that this is a facility that can be used to improve their behaviour, too, but I'm not, so I won't :-p
In addition, the fishy formulation "on systems" sounds like one of those school reports where the author didn't read the book to the end and had to write the report on it anyway. But on top of that, they also didn't bother looking up their hero's credits:
Landon Fuller was an engineer in Apple's BSD Technology Group, and one of the principal architects of the Darwin system
I'll let Landon himself correct that, by quoting from his web site:
A number of publications have done the architects of Darwin a disservice by stating that I'm "one of the principal architects of Apple's BSD-based Darwin operating system core". I just want to set the record straight: I originally wrote DarwinPorts (now MacPorts), with Kevin Van Vechten and Jordan Hubbard. Darwin was architected by minds far brighter than my own.
That's like saying the guy who wrote Software Update had written Mac OS X with only two other people... Tsk, tsk... didn't bother reading up to the end of the sentence there, eh, Tom?
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