Apple Sends Hidden Message to Hackers?

RetrogradeMotion writes "The OSx86 Project is reporting on a hidden message to hackers in Apple's new MacBook Pro. The new Intel-based OS X contains a file named 'Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext' and is accompanied by the message, 'The purpose of this Apple software is to protect Apple copyrighted materials from unauthorized copying and use.' The file is not present in either the PowerPC version of OS X or the Intel version shipped to developers last year. While Apple has sent messages to hackers before, is this a tounge-in-cheek introduction to the anticipated (and hated) Trusted Platform Module? Is locking down OS X a strategic necessity or a missed opportunity?" Obviously a big maybe here, but a good story just the same.

Comments

Re:Brian, there's a message in my Alphabet.

[wass]

My friend, back in 1997, claimed that sometime a few years earlier he and his friends were trying to hack some game on his Mac, so they were browsing the various files with a hex editor. Apparently one of the files, somewhere in the middle, had alot of text saying "blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah" for many 'pages', and at some point in the middle said "why are you reading this?"

Hell, maybe this example is even common knowledge amonst the slashdot crowd.

why bother

[fermion]

One problem with using a full commidity system is one them has to go to great and often silly lengths to make it look non comodity, else everyone else just copyies it. If Apple wants to limit Mac OS use to Apple equipment, then Apple should just say it won't support anyone who is not using Apple equpipment. Honestly, the foray into non-Apple hardware proved that cost cutting merely causes problems. I don't know anyone who bought one of those non-Apple machines that did not have big problems.

Now, with regard to the text in question
software is to protect Apple copyrighted materials from unauthorized copying and use.
this could merely indicate that Apple is going get more aggressive about insuring that the OS in use is indeed paid for. That is, if a single user copy is bought, then it is only used on the single computer. I have no problems with this, as a five user edition can be acquired for less than Windows XP. Now, if this copy protection becomes too much of hassle and wastes my time, such as typing in long serial numbers, I will likely be looking for an OS with less hassle.

But the facts remains that the move to intel will expose Apple to a greater risk of unlicensed use of thier product, and they are likely to react accordingly, no matter how silly. I hope they don't make me pay for an extra chip to manage thier shrinkage issue. I hope that it is a simple matter of registering the machine and the serial of the software at Apple, as they appear to do now, and then just leave us alone. Honestly, if I wish to install one of my licensing of Mac OS on an extra PC, and I cannot, then I am likley to an become an irate customer. And given how ambivilant many of us are about the move to intel, I would hope that Apple would think long and hard about transforming that ambivilance to outright annoyance.

Legality of Apple tying software to hardware.

[GnuPooh]

OK I've asked a couple lawyers and they all seem to agree. If Apple sells their OS separately on their website (which they do)*. They can't legal say that you can only use their software their hardware. The other side of course is you need to break the DMCA to use it on any other hardware. I'd really like to see someone challege Apple in court. I don't think they can legally say you can buy their OS, but can only use it on their hardware.

* Currently, they only sell the PPC version, but let's assume they'll offer the next release to Intel Mac users.

Re:Legality of Apple tying software to hardware.

[E8086]

If that's the case, it sounds a lot like the garage door opener and Lexmark ink cartrige arguements, both rejected. You can only use our remote with our door opener, you can only use our ink cartriges with our printers. Both tried to "encrypt" the devices to claim protection under the DMCA(anti-napster act) to stop the generic device makers and both failed. Now it seems Apple could be trying to prevent the use if its software on generic PC hardware. To challenge this in court, assuming you've legally purchased the software and have all the receipts and paperwork all should have to do is use "to use on generic hardware" in the right places and make it look like Apple is trying some anti-competition practices.

Re:Can't Apple be forced to release OS X for all x

[Malor]

I don't think that's true. I believe ISA was simply reverse engineered, I don't think it was ever licensed by anybody. That was the whole point to the PS/2 and the Micro Channel architecture... it was something IBM actually owned and COULD license. They had this vision of a piece of every PC out there, but MCA was complex, expensive to implement, and then expensive to license on top of that. So, for the most part, the industry just went around them, with EISA (never broadly taken up), VESA Local Bus for graphics, and then eventually PCI. Micro Channel died a quiet death.

I don't think anyone has ever attempted to license VGA, either. NVidia and ATI license out their modern 3D chips to third parties, but basic VGA functionality is, to my best knowledge, a completely free specification, and always has been.

Re:Can't Apple be forced to release OS X for all x

[tm2b]

I had an Amiga (also a 68k processor), and there was some company back then that sold a board that allowed you to take ROMs out of a dead Mac and put them on their board, and then you could boot Mac OS up as a task under AmigaDOS.

LOL. Yep, that was the EMPLANT, and worked really well. The main problem with the product was that the company's president (Jim Drew) would consistently absurdly overpromise on the newsgroup (to the point where people were maintaining a huge file called "Jim Drew's lies"). The product itself was pretty solid, except that it turned out that despite Jim Drew's claims that the board had a custom magic emulation engine, really wasn't much more than a glorified dongle with serial ports and a socket to read the Mac ROMs.

At some point later, Christian Bauer released Shapeshifter to compete with EMPLANT, and then after Jim Drew claimed that Shapeshifter was stealing EMPLANT ip (which kind of put the lie to his earlier claims that the card held the emulation engine) released the GPLed Basilisk II, which is still usable on modern hardware - emulating the MCM680x0 Mac under Windows, x86 Linux and Unixes, and PPC Mac OS X.

In any case, if I recall correctly the ROM wasn't even used directly... you could obtain a ROM image on the net if you didn't have one to rip with the card.

Re:At this point...

[jbolden]

Microsoft's success has pretty much always been based on winning price wars. They won the OS battle by having the cheapest OS combined with cheap hardware. They won the office suite battle by selling for around 30% of what the compitition was selling for. They made huge progress on the server front by being much cheaper than Oracle, Sun....

How is Apple supposed to win on that front? Apple has never shown the ability to outperform companies like Dell with respect to logistics. Apple has never shown an ability to offer the best value for the money in a mature market (according the the mainstream). What Apple has shown is an ability to out innovate.

Re:Brian, there's a message in my Alphabet.

[Carthag]

In the soundtrack for the Amiga game Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge 2, composed by Barry Leitch, there's a sample saying "you will not copy this game". It's practically impossible to hear while playing, but if you get ahold of the .mod file, it's sample 2 or 3 (it's been a while since I loaded that one up). I remember reading rumors that it was originally supposed to say "kill your parents" but in the end they chickened out and went with the anti-copying message.

Ironically, the version I played back then was copied.

Re:Logical Thought: Apple & Hardware Profits

[curious.corn]

Hmm, I guess you've never tried to install Linux on an ASUS notebook. Today, three years later it might be an easier experience but believe me it used to be a royal pain. Wicked broken bioses that wouldn't sleep the machine when the lid closed, nasty bugs that would lock up the gfx hw so badly to require a cold restart, crappy P'n'P that wouldn't enumerate the attached hardware and make linux struggle when looking for it and stinky bioses that wouldn't properly shut down the PIC (or perhaps jitter some "lid open" signal, but that's not sw, it's plain bad hw) and wake windows 2000 when the laptop was sleeping... and presumably inside a bag.

I had to choose between a vertical solution where the same company designed both hardware and software and quickly nailed every single darn bug (not only security gaping maws) or a chaos of different hardwares only loosely following specs and hoping to fix 'em in software workarounds.

I bought an external firewire enclosure; it used to work fine but the damn chipset firmware decided to quit claiming it's fw id as by spec. Os X would refuse to sense the device unless, once in a while the signals would be stable enough to get the firmware to follow procedures. I had to wait for an xp64 fix that incidentally added the necessary firmware workarounds (IE increasing wait states during power up) to get the thing reliable on the mac. Hmm, and that was an add-on... imagine that multiplied for all peripherials in a regular pc. Apple takes the chore out of computing.

Apple is turn key. I bought a bluetooth thingie and the guy at the shop said: "hmm, I don't know, this device is a bit fussy I struggled a weekend and failed on a couple of XPs". I plugged it in, waited for Os X to bring the bluetooth portion alive and synced my address book within 5 minutes. The guy at the counter was close to tears; I was happy to have bought an Apple Powerbook with Os X.

Ok, I could choose a dell, run windows home and follow the program, but I'd be struggling with viruses, spywarez and surrendering 1 GHz and a RAM stick to Norton to get my job done. Or I could run Linux and curse the damn manufacturer for making cheap broken hardware and only provide software fixes for windows.

I still long for open, fully spec'd platforms, properly designed hardware modules and combinations and timely updates to fix deviations from the agreed standard. Today, by a bad approximation, that means using windows. Today, I won't run windows and I will happily pay 100for the privilege of better software bundled to neatly ironed hardware (where linux, btw, is a champ)