In the grand scheme of things, relatively few people ever claim $20,000 for a day's worth of work. You can be one of them, provided you put your hacker hat on and attend the Pwn2Own contest next month. Google's challenge is this: Be the first to "pop [the Cr-48's Chrome] browser and escape the sandbox using vulnerabilities purely present in Google-written code" and the bounty, as well as the laptop, are both yours to keep, TippingPoint said in a blog post.

"If competitors are unsuccessful, on day 2 and 3 the ZDI will offer $10,000 USD for a sandbox escape in non-Google code and Google will offer $10,000 USD for the Chrome bug. Either way, plugins other than the built-in PDF support are out of scope," TippingPoint said.

TippingPoint has put up a total cash pool of $125,000 in this year's Pwn2Own contest, with only $20,000 coming from outside funding (Google). This is the first time Google has offered a cash prize as part of the event, though it's worth mentioning that Chrome was the only browser to remain unscathed during last year's contest.

Futuremark has come up with a fun way to promote the upcoming launch of 3DMark 11, a DirectX 11 benchmark that promises to punish machines not up to the task. It's called the "3DMark 11 Guess the Score" contest, and all you contestants have to do is guess how three gaming systems will score in the new benchmark. Here are the three systems:

System 1

Intel G6950 CPU
MSI N450GTS Cyclone Power Edition
MSI H55N-E33 Motherboard
3DMark 11 Entry Preset

System 2

Intel Core i5 750 CPU
MSI N460GTX Hawk
MSI P55-GD85 Motherboard
3dMark 11 Performance Preset

System 3

Intel Core i7 980X CPU
MSI N480GTX Lightning
MSI Bigbang XPower Motherboard
3DMark 11 Extreme Preset

The obvious trend here is all that MSI branded hardware, and that's by design. MSI is sponsoring the contest, and for each system, whoever comes up with the closest guess to the actual score will win the MSI motherboard and videocard from that rig.

Easy, right? You can go here to enter.