The MacBook Air was the first laptop to fall in the CanSecWest hacking contest. Hacker Charlie Miller took home ther MacBook Air and a $10,000 cash prize Thursday after breaking into the machine at the CanSecWest security conference’s PWN 2 OWN hacking contest.

Conference organizers offered a Sony Vaio, Fujitsu U810 and MacBook Air (running Linux, Vista and Leopard) as prizes to anybody who could hack into them and read the contents of a file on the system using a previously undisclosed “0day” attack.

Nobody was able to hack into the systems on the first day of the contest when exploits had to be performed over the network so on Thursday the rules were relaxed so that attackers could have the target notebooks do things like visit Web sites or open e-mail messages.

Within two minutes of the new rule’s implementation Miller directed the contest’s organizers to visit a Web site that contained his exploit code which then allowed him to seize control of the computer.

The software vendor will continue support for the VB 6.0 runtime for existing applications.

Microsoft is ending support for the Visual Basic 6.0 integrated development environment.

Jeff Nuckolls, a Microsoft blogger, in an April 3 post said that the IDE will no longer be supported as of April 8.

“If you haven’t converted all your apps to .NET, shame on you, but don’t freak out,” Nuckolls wrote. “Microsoft will continue to support the VB 6.0 runtime for all existing application in all the next versions of the Windows OS including Windows Server 2008 and Vista. However; who knows how many years the runtime will be supported, so you might want to start considering a migration plan, if not for supportability concerns, then to take advantage of the performance, security, power of the .Net Framework and the productivity of Visual Studio 2008.”

Google’s ban on projects licensed under the Affero GPL license has claimed its first victim. The ClipperZ online password manager has defected to rival code host SourceForge.

ClipperZ said it was transferring from Google Code to SourceForge because it wanted to use AGPL. The AGPL-licensed Orangemesh open source dashboard server is also in the process of moving.

The projects will join around 10 other AGPL-licensed efforts on SourceForge, compared to six on Google Code. Before the defections, Google had been discouraging other AGPL projects, saying Google Code does not support AGPL.

The dispute between Google and developers who want to use AGPL - a version of GPLv3 tailored for use in software as a service - has rumbled on since last November, when AGPL was finalized.

Google’s exact reasons for disallowing AGPL remain unclear.