You may remember good-old David Maynor, the infamous hacker who caused a stir in the Mac community by "exploiting" a "loophole" in a MacBook's WiFi that allowed an outside user to gain control of the system. Of course, the hack was then promptly disputed by all sorts of people, said to be a hoax, and generally made fun of. A little bit later on, Maynor and co. turned up in a nerd-tastic war of words on the internet over an OS X "worm," trading barbs, assuming fake names, creating counterfeit blogs, and eventually being reduced to death-threats and public "outings" of their online personalities. Now, according to reports, Maynor is "officially" publishing the details of his original exploit, freed from legal shackles (i.e., NDAs) which he claim prevented him from revealing the truth about his hack. The hot-blooded work is to be published in the September issue of Uninformed.org (an online hacking journal). Says Maynor, "Let them tear me apart all they want but at the end of the day the technical merit of the paper will stand on its own." To which we respond: your 15 minutes are up.

If you can keep track of the bad TV movie / high school drama that the OS X worm saga has become, hats off to you. In the latest round of confusing doublespeak from the underbelly of the security world, a few key players are (possibly) taking turns swapping identities -- and trading death threats. In the latest installment, Jon Ramsey is Infosec Sellout, David Maynor is LMH, anonymous commenters are promising to "put a bullet in your head for this!" and a spooky legion of "black hat" hackers known as the "Phrack High Council," (or PHC) are doing their best Freemasons impersonation. Now, with the Infosec site deletions, and Dave Maynor's supposed self-outing, calls being issued for the worm to be proven in the wild are increasingly mixed with the literal cries of bloody murder -- all over what can best be described as the lamest hoax for the biggest nerds in internet history. Check out the Computerworld article for some... insight?

Update: As noted by a few commenters, David Maynor is now claiming on his blog that he isn't LMH, and that the admission "from" him had been faked. Of course, in this subterfuge-filled war of words, we'll take it with a grain of salt.

[Via Slashdot]

Several weeks ago, we regaled you with the tale of how a pair of hackers, David Maynor and Jon "Johnny Cache" Ellch claimed that they could pwn a MacBook in a minute flat. The dynamic duo then showed the exploit to Brian Krebs, a reporter at The Washington Post and a controversy ensued over the next few weeks as to who had shown exactly what to whom when. The most recent episode involved Apple telling Macworld two days ago that SecureWorks, Maynor's employer, hadn't showed Apple any specific information -- however, on its own, Apple discovered a problem, then released security and wireless patches for PowerPC-based and Intel-based Macs. Meanwhile, SecureWorks has been awfully mum on the issue, refusing to say anything further to Krebs or to the IDG News Service. Glenn Fleishman has a very lengthy blog entry over at Wi-Fi Net News that provides a play-by-play of this whole situation, but points out that Maynor and Ellch are scheduled to speak at Toorcon in San Diego later this month, and concludes by saying that he thinks the pair will show their cards and tell all, which may finally settle this torrid affair.