Apologies for the title. It is something of an old (2001), geeky joke. I’m not quite sure why it caught on, except that it captures something. In any case, the important thing is that a researcher at a US Naval College has demonstrated the ability to hijack pretty much any laptop with a wireless network card, using what seems to be a fairly automated process. As has been widely reported this flaw also affects Apple machines, as well as Windows ones. I wouldn’t be too keen on trusting the linux drivers either, especially now that more and more cards are using binary blobs provided by the manufacturers.
The problem is the hardware drivers for network cards, which of necessity talk to the kernel of the system and which seem to be fairly flawed as a genre. Two points occur to me: firstly that similar flaws are presumably present in wired network drivers; secondly, that it is good that a military researcher is prepared to make this public, rather than keeping the technology to itself. Of course, it is in the interests of any purchaser of IT equipment that this is fixed, though institutions sometimes do not always see the big picture, and a more cynical person might have expected a military research lab to keep this under wraps. In the short to medium term, this is a very frightening exploit and it is quite enough to make one very paranoid indeed.
UPDATE: AJJ notes this, possibly related, announcement.