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Mac OS X Intel Build Addresses Pirating
aardwolf64 writes "ThinkSecret has an article up detailing information about the newest Mac OS X 10.4.3 builds (which is currently said to fix almost 500 bugs with 10.4.2.) What is more interesting is the release of 10.4.2 (Intel) to developers. Universal binaries built with the new version (and apparently all subsequent versions) will not work on systems running the older version of the OS."
That's a lot of bugs. And I haven't even noticed any of them. :(
Is that really so surprising? That a company will act to protect its products from people who are blatantly pirating it and enacting workarounds to bypass whatever security might have been present to ensure it only worked on developer workstations?
Oh no, your pirated pre-release software can't be upgraded! Teh horror!
I'm sure when Rhapsody (the Pre-OSX betas just after the NeXT takeover) was being developed, that some of the same types of incompatibilities were there.
;)
Think about it though, most apps from 10.3 don't work properly in 10.2, but that doesn't mean it's apple's way of keeping pirates away. Since all these X86 versions are beta quality anyway, they're probably working on a much faster development mode, and things break easier.
Then again, they could be doing it on purpose, in which case they have the right, since it's their OS.
Since this is still not a publicly released Operating System available to buy, I'm not all that surprised they're taking care of this sort of thing now. There's no reason for them to care about the old versions of the Operating System if it is not available to the general public. Once the Operating System is actually available to buy this sort of thing will stop, but they want their developers to be using the most recent version available to give them the newest target. I don't really see a problem with this.
cheese logs keep my wang warm at night.
I was reading some publicly available Apple documentation on the transition to intel style chips, and they included a note that as of June they hadn't finalized their application-binary-interface (ABI) specification for MacOS X on intel. So, maybe it just means they changed the spec and now there's an incompatibility. It would be something most developers would never see, totally taken care of by the compiler, and a make clean and a recompile necessarily fixes everything.
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Well, the poster has one take on this, but perhaps the current release is incompatible because Apple has changed the compiler and some of the dynamic libraries? Perhaps this was not to specifically address pirating, but to fix bugs and to otherwise optimize the system. The OS X 86 project page has a slightly more informed discussion.
Currently Apple requires NO serial number, registration, or any other verification to load OS X. People trade Jaguar, Panther & Tiger disk images on filesharing networks and they burn great. The same disks or legit copies can be used to load onto multiple machines on the same network. "Upgrades" bought from Apple require no previous version's SN to install, and cost the same as a brand new copy.
The big question is, does this new policy signal a change?I hope not, I appreciate Apple's laid back policy. Right now I'm trying to determine which flavor works best on my near-obsolete G3/333 "Lombard" Powerbook. It's convenient to be able to try out different options before I license a copy.
Most cracks are extremely simple, crackers are simply looking for a conditional and unconditional jump instruction, that's it! Then it's all about stepping into the code step by step and having break points.
if ( !condition ) { error_message(); }
http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/x86-jumps.html
So, one easy way is as simple as by passing the checks by renaming JZ into JNZ, JE into JNE, JO into JNO, or similar when the serial number is checked.
This way any invalid serial is now actually valid...
You might have to add a NOP to make the instruction the same length.
Other serials are simply generated by having the serial key code compare being blindly copied into another program to create a keygen.
if ( input_key != calculated_key ) { error(); }
Another way is to run it in debug mode and then see the content of the register having calculated_key.
The only product scheme which are more difficult to crack is those which they *seems* to be cracked, but fail unexpectively after a period of time which is very far apart the actual "test".
Days or weeks is a good delay.
And for products which prevent "debug mode" utilities, well, there exist other products to go around this issue by simply masquerading the WinIce/SoftIce application, so it doesn't get detected and prevented from running in "debug mode".
That's all I can tell.
Some of course are encrypted, but even then the code must be "decrypted" before being run so...
it's still possible to analyze it, just a bit harder.
In the end, the best way for a product is to be good, useful, have nice manuals and have a proper support at the right price, then the majority of people will buy it, especially if it's bundled with good hardware, since it wouldn't make sense otherwise.
I think you'd be discouraging them too if there was a chance all your profits would die because you could go out anywhere and get an illegal copy of their OS and run it on generic hardware.
Sure some people would actually buy legitament copies of OS X for the MacTels, but a lot more people would just pirate it to save money and not buy an Apple Machine.
If you have a choice between buying an Apple Machine at $2000, but you can build an even more powerful machine for that price or lower and stick a cracked copy of OS X on it, where will you spend your money?
Believe me, I'd love to have an Athlon 64 FX-57 PowerMac over some Pentium Mac any day, but Apple has to keep itself afloat. They can't live off the iPod sales forever.
Erm-- This is a developer system. It's not finished. This isn't The Thing That'll Be Released Next Year, it's something cobbled together so that folks like me can make sure my software will work on the processor/hardware. It's not a live system that's being 'bugfixed', it's a development system that's actively being developed. That means it'll change. Binary file formats, linker specifics, etc. etc. We're not so much 'upgrading', we're keeping our aim focusssed on a moving target.
...also, having re-read your comment: where do you get the idea that anyone wants to maintain any sort of compatibility with the original 10.4.1 DTK? I mean, it's not like it's been released to the public or anything. Compatibility with the intel build of OS X 10.4.1 is not required; compatibility with the intel build of OS X 10.2 will also have been broken, but you don't seem concerned about that...? Or do you think we should all maintain compatibility with the pirated copies of OS Xi 10.4.1?
(For the record, intel apps built under 10.4.1 still work using 10.4.2; I'd guess that new capabilities/functions were added to the intel dynamic linker, which gcc 4.0.1 uses)
Again, you seem to be labouring under a misapprehension here. Universal Binaries are what are technically known as 'fat' binaries. In other words, they are a file which contains more than one executable file concatenated together. In this case, it's a file which has the i386 binary and the ppc binary within it, padded to fit the encapsulated 'files' on filesystem block boundaries (4096 bytes) and with a header up front that says where they are.
I can't believe I'm having to say this on Slashdot of all places, but universal binaries are not some weird magical thing which runs the same binary code on two different processors. They're not like the bytecode generated for the Java Virtual Machine. They're just a way of storing the binary code & data for different architectures within a single file. That's all.
Oh, and want to see a shipping application compiled as a universal binary? Try BBEdit 8.2.3 (here are the release notes).
Apple took a $795 user operating system ($1295 with the development system), moderized it, added new technologies (many of which were open sourced) and open sourced the core OS.
They now sell it commerically (with the development system) for ~$120.
Meanwhile, they are giving away:
-Darwin
-QuickTime streaming server
-Webkit
-Launchd
-Netinfo
-I/O Kit
Nobody in the open source community really asked for any of those things, Apple just opened them.
Then again, the things that people want from Apple has never been part of "a free operating system" that Apple benefitted from:
- QuickTime (particularly the commercial codecs)
- OpenStep / Cocoa / Carbon APIs
- Quartz compositor, Q. Extreme
- Core Image, Video, etc; Core Data
So mentioning the GPL isn't applicable at all. Apple has borrowed from and contributed things back using BSD style licenses.
Trying for force people to share isn't freedom.
Incorrect.
The dynamic linker in OS X makes the actual location of functions & other symbols in a linked library irrelevant, since the addresses are computed at run time by the dynamic loader -- the compiler inserts a 'stub' routine and a dummy address. The dummy address is first initialised to the address of a compiled-in function called _dyld_stub_binding_helper, which calls the relevant dyld library APIs to find the real function. The real address is then written over the dummy address, so future invocations will jump straight to the target routine.
I compile apps on OS X 10.4. Most things I compile using gcc 3.3 (because gcc 4.0 auto-links against a library that isn't present in 10.2.x), but I've never had the slightest problem running an app on an earlier version of the operating system. Unless I actually attempt to use a symbol that actually isn't there, nothing goes wrong.
Also, OS X has had weak-linking since 10.2. That means that the stub binding routine can happily return a symbol address of zero, meaning that I can link against somelib.dylib, including somefunc() which only exists in 10.4 & later, and -- at runtime -- I can simply do if (somefunc != 0) to see if the function is available. On 10.4, the function will be there. On earlier systems, the symbol value will just be zero.
Y'know, you should actually read the links you post, for instance, on the page you linked you'll find this useful nugget of information:
...you seem to imply that you're a programmer, so I'd recommend looking at <AvailabilityMacros.h> for further enlightenment.
So no, this isn't "just how Xcode works". Xcode (read: gcc & dyld) work in precisely the opposite way, and for a good reason. What's really happening is that some part of the binary file format has been changed, implemented, or created for the benefit of the Mach-O/dyld runtime.
Maybe it's something new for the Intel machines; maybe it's something that has been available for PPC, but just wasn't implemented in the Intel build of OS X 10.4.1; maybe the latest Intel build of dyld has some performance enhancements which are mirrored by a slight re-ordering of the data/text section format & flags. It doesn't really matter, since even now-- and this seems to be an important yet frequently ignored point so I'll make it very clear --
OS X for Intel is NOT FINISHED YET
Apple can and will make changes. That's part of the reason why folks like me have Developer Transition Kits. So we & they can find things that don't work so well, and would do better if they were changed slightly. This is just work in progress, and things can be changed, removed, added. It's Just Normal.
-Q