Briefly: S&P ups Apple to "Strong Buy", Apple posts teaser

S&P upgrades Apple

Standard and Poor's analyst Richard Stice on Friday upgraded shares of Apple from a 4-star "Buy" to a 5-star "Strong Buy," saying the most recent formal disclosures surrounding its stock-option issues are helping to alleviate lingering uncertainty for the company.

"While the entire scenario is cause for concern, we believe these formal disclosures will help alleviate lingering uncertainty for the company," he wrote. "Moreover, we think fundamental business drivers remain intact."

Stice maintained his 12-month target price of $110 on shares of Apple.

Month of Apple Bugs tips-off

A security analyst who vowed that January would be the "Month of Apple Bugs," is making good on his promise this week with an inaugural bug listing titled "Apple Quicktime rtsp URL Handler Stack-based Buffer Overflow."

"A vulnerability exists in the handling of the rtsp:// URL handler," the analyst wrote. "By supplying a specially crafted string (rtsp:// [random] + semicolon + [299 bytes padding + payload]), an attacker could overflow a stack-based buffer, using either HTML, Javascript or a QTL file as attack vector, leading to an exploitable remote arbitrary code execution condition."

The issue has been successfully exploited in QuickTime Version 7.1.3 and Player Version 7.1.3, according to the report. Previous versions should also be vulnerable on both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

Apple posts teaser on website

Apple this week updated the landing page of Apple.com with a new graphic and teaser for the new year. "The first 30 years were just the beginning," the company wrote. "Welcome to 2007."

As noted by MacRumors, the last time Apple posted pre-Macworld teasers was in 2002. In that instance, the company changed its teaser text daily in the week leading up to Macworld San Francisco 2002.

"This one is big. Even by our standards," read one message. "Beyond the rumor sites. Way beyond," said another.

The 2002 conference eventually gave way to the flat-panel iMac, a 14-inch iBook, iPhoto and the first Macs to ship with Mac OS X as the default operating system.