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Looks like some free love from Microsoft.

Looks like (as predicted) Apple is finally starting to come under the radar of potential hackers. Apple has pushed out its first ever automatic, silent security update to Mac OS X users, fixing a vulnerability in NTP that would’ve allowed hackers to turn Macs into DDoS zombies. In some ways, this finally brings Apple up to parity with Microsoft: Windows has technically had the ability to do automatic updates for a long time, though it’s very rare to see them performed while a... system is in use usually Windows waits for you to shut down to reboot before installing patches. Rather impressively, the OS X security patch should install transparently, with no need to restart. Last week, some Googlers discovered some vulnerabilities in the Network Time Protocol (NTP), including a buffer overflow vulnerability that allows an attacker to execute malicious code on a remote system. Most Unix-like operating systems (Linux, BSD, OS X, etc.) use NTP to synchronize their clocks an exact number of vulnerable systems isn’t known, but we’re almost certainly talking about millions of computers, including Macs running OS X 10.8, 10.9, and 10.10. In any case, Apple thought this was a good opportunity to try out OS X’s automatic silent-patching mechanism. The feature has been present in OS X for at least a couple of years, but Apple says this is the first time it has ever been used. Whether this is indicative of Apple’s fairly slow-and-lazy approach to security, or just a dearth of vulnerabilities, I don’t know. Even though OS X is gaining in popularity, it still pales in comparison to Windows’ market penetration so while Microsoft is constantly fighting to keep Windows secure, it’s relatively rare to see hackers or researchers target OS X, and thus we generally see very few security patches from Apple. See more

These aren’t the first Windows 9 photos to leak onto the web but they do provide a closer look at the return of the Start Menu. If you recall, Microsoft removed the Start Menu in Windows 8 which left many users up in arms. Hmmmm... looks like the old desktop look and feel might be back. It will be interesting to see what the final result will be at release.