Despite a warning of the illegalities of using any of the information contained within the article to attack systems which you do not own, the cracking tutorial proved too much for Barnes & Noble. The US bookseller pulled all copies of the magazine from shelves, although it's not yet clear whether it did so at the request of its own management or as a response to complaints from an outside agency.

In a response to Barnes & Noble's apparent censorship, Future has elected to put the content of the article online for free, for those who were unable to read it in the magazine. Quoting security guru Bruce Schneier - 'I believe that the subject is just too critical, too integral a part of our everyday lives, to be left exclusively in the hands of experts' - the magazine's editors have defended the feature while apologising for those who missed out on the magazine.

The publication has also elected to continue with the planned publication of an pro-privacy tutorial in the latest issue entitled 'Beat the CIA,' in response to government plans in both the UK and US to introduce increasingly intrusive communications monitoring and censorship laws.

As ZDNet reports, OS X 10.7.3 spits out a debug log file containing "the login passwords of every user who has logged in since the update was applied." The file isn't generated on all configurations. However, "anyone who used FileVault encryption on their Mac prior to Lion, upgraded to Lion, but kept the folders encrypted using the legacy version of FileVault" could be affected. ZDNet quotes security researcher David Emery, who says the log files can be accessed by third parties in a variety of ways:

This is worse than it seems, since the log in question can also be read by booting the machine into firewire disk mode and reading it by opening the drive as a disk or by booting the new-with-LION recovery partition and using the available superuser shell to mount the main file system partition and read the file. This would allow someone to break into encrypted partitions on machines they did not have any idea of any login passwords for.

Apple is reportedly considering responding to the upcoming second-generation ultrabooks by launching a US$799 MacBook Air in the third quarter of 2012, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

Although Acer has recently reduced its ultrabook shipment target, Intel continues to aggressively push ultrabooks and is aiming to have the devices priced at US$699 in the second half of the year. However, if Intel is unable to bring down ASPs to its goal, the price gap between ultrabooks and the US$799 MacBook Air may further postpone the time ultrabooks become standardized, the sources noted.

According to Australian site Atomic MPC, the company has revealed that the manufacturing process of its next-gen GPUs has improved to the point where the same average voltages can yield much higher clock speeds. Recent chips can reach 1.25GHz without struggling, which means a conservative "GHz Edition" of the 7970 can now safely be rolled out, of course with scope for much higher overclocking on third-party boards with more robust coolers. By the time the battle between Red and Green reaches full-swing, it might not be so easy to call a winner.