Amit Singh's Challenge: Find a Decade-Old Bug

dreicodan writes "Well this has too many juicy Mac OS X nuggets in one bag! All details are on this page, but I'll summarise. Apparently Amit Singh discovered a 10+ year old serious bug in OS X. The bug started in Nextstep and is still in Panther (and apparently Tiger, too). Then Amit wrote a program to demo the bug, but also made the program capable of hiding what it does using some complicated Mach kernel voodo! He then threw a challenge open to OS X experts to figure out the bug. It turns out that a week and some 1000 downloads later, three brilliant hackers (Alexy Proskuryakov, Andrew Wellington, Graham Dennis) were able to solve the puzzle. Also looks like other than these guys, nobody got anywhere with the problem. Be ready for extremely gory details of how the program was written and how it was decoded. Its a thrilling read, and OS X hacking doesn't get any more hardcore than this! Hopefully Apple fixes this bug now at last."

Comments

Funny responses

[aftk2]

While the actual solutions submitted to Singh's challenge were interesting, some of the other responses are more entertaining:

"I think you must be hacking the main frame to crash the kernal. Whatever you're program is doing, its hot stuff!"

"While I haven't looked at your program, but have you checked permissions? I had my system crash at random times due to messed up permissions on my external drive."

"Could you at least of provided a simple Cocoa GUI for your program? Terminal app programs are not very popular with Mac people, you know."

"Who do you think you are for insulting people like this?"

That's some funny stuff.

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/challenge/result/

10 years?

[KingBahamut]

Thats a long time, almost meets M$ standards.

How zen

[daeley]

If a bug fails in an OS, and no one finds it, does it make a sound?

Re:How zen

[Tordek]

What is the sound of one kernel panicking?
A lot of cursing, that is.

Re:How zen

[Golias]

A Mac owner wakes up from a nightmare in which he encountered a BSOD, and wonders to himself... Is he a Mac user who had a nightmare about Windows XP, or is he a PC user, now asleep and dreaming that he uses OS X?

Let's all hope

[amichalo]

Hopefully Apple fixes this bug now at last.

Man, What with blowing away their 2Q'05 earnings projections, I hope the first thing Apple does is address this bug that no one has paid any attention to in 10 years. That will make me as a Apple user and share holder happier than if they continue this "innovation" fad.