Tired of all the knee-jerk banter from fanboys about whose operating system is the most secure? So are the organizers of the CanSecWest security conference, which will be held in Vancouver later this month. And with a contest awarding as much as $25,000 worth of prizes, they're likely to breathe fresh life into a stale debate.

This year's Pwn2Own competition will place three brand-new, fully patched laptops side by side: a Fujitsu U810 running Vista Ultimate, a Vaio VGN-TZ37Cn running Ubuntu 7.10 and a MacBook Air running Leopard. The first person to remotely run code on each one gets to take the machine home, and is automatically entered into the running for a $25,000 award from TippingPoint, whose Zero Day Initiative pays bounties to researchers for responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities.