Slashdot Mirror
Revisiting the Macintosh ROM Easter Egg
eldavojohn writes "NYCResistor has published photos of what they call 'Ghosts in the ROM' after dumping Apple Mac SE ROM images from a roadside Motorola 68000-era Macintosh and looking at all the data (they mention an Easter egg reference to this from 1999). They go into some nice detail about the strategy for extracting this data from a discarded unit and noticing structure. There's also other data that they weren't able to identify, which causes one to wonder how many other Easter eggs are lying about in various ROM chips and what modern Easter eggs must be shipping with software/hardware today."
That first picture reminds me of watching cinemax when I was a teenager, minus the naked women.
Of course there are easter eggs stored in ROMs. You only need to look as far as to video games to find long rants hidden in there (just see http://www.bretz.ca/dave/tetrisrant.htm for an example)
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Obligatory: it's the launch codes!
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
One man's easter egg can easily be another man's malware. This sounds kind of cool, until you realise there could be any number of malicious "easter eggs"
In the increasingly litigious world of software, it seemed like a lot of Easter eggs disappeared from operating systems and from business software. Software became professional and had less use for a sense of humor, undocumented code became a possible liability, and it seems to be looked upon a little more as having no place in the business world. Which is said, I think.
If you have time for easter eggs, you clearly aren't coding hard enough; and if the product has space for easter eggs, we clearly haven't shaved the BOM hard enough!
I expect this nonsense to be gone in revision B, no matter how many nights and weekends it takes!
... and "military security risks" usually put in by offshore programmers.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
All other ROMs, not just Apple's.
I know IBM BIOSes contain a large number of Easter eggs.
Unfortunately we started to call them "bugs" back in the 80s.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
there used to be a site [probably still out there]
that had images found on all sorts of chips
CPU's , ROM, etc etc
no Idea what it was called
but there have been digital artists plying their works for years and years...
the MAC images have been know about since like forever ?
who where what when now?
Didn't they bother to search for any of this on Google? This Easter egg was publicized YEARS ago. maybe in 30 years someone else will publish an article about finding data on a hard drive.
That would be the link to the 1999 report of an Easter egg (in the fucking summary no less). The neat thing here is how they got all the pictures from two PROM chips.
if the product has space for easter eggs, we clearly haven't shaved the BOM hard enough!
Say you have a program that fits in the first 412 KiB of a 512 KiB chip. No, it wouldn't be possible to trim that down to 256 KiB, the next smaller chip, on the provided budget. What else should the developers put into the unused space?
my favorite easter egg was in the early amiga 'rom' (kickstart) -
if you held down both shift keys, both ctrl keys, one of the function keys, then inserted a floppy disk,
the screen would briefly flash "the amiga - we made it, commodore fucked it up'.
I recall on my //c I could type "VERIFY" (with no filename, or with no DOS booted) and it would return
COPYRIGHT (C) 1984 APPLE COMPUTER (beep!)
I heard a rumor, I'm not sure if it was urban legend or real, that some company pirated apple's rom into their apple 2 clone and it went to court. And in court, they had brought in a clone computer that was "not infringing" and the prosecution asked them to type "VERIFY" and hit return. The message that displayed on their machine closed the case.
Anyone know if that really happened?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I remember actually seeing this via MacsBug back in the early 90s. I also remember we had a few MacPlus' that had engraved signatures on the inside of the box.
The comments at TFA point out how you know you're old when your common knowledge is someone else's hacker archaeological project.
Isaac Asimov's prediction in Foundation may prove true -- in there scientists (at least 30 kiloyears in the future) argue about the validiy of the "millenial depth" theory, that you only needed to delve into the past 1000 years of history or science papers, and that if it wasn't talked about there, it wouldn't be any further back.
As to the hidden malware issue, read the prologue of Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. It's readable on Amazon (except page 4 for some odd reason). There's some, literally, galactic-class malware hidden in static data.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Read the fine summary? people socially bitcoining their way through this cloudy web 3.0 thing don't have time for such things. Seriously though, the story is indeed worth reading. Much geek wood to be had.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
..."back door"?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Oops. Your hat is taped on a bit too tight.
Somebody help this fellow out, will you?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Christ, what an asshole.
Yes, this was known. But the process of pulling them off the ROMs yourself? Documenting the process? Yeah, no one was kind enough to wrap all that up in one place. It's a fun read and if you're not careful even you, Mighty Internet Commenter, might learn something.
Shut the hell up and contribute. Bitching gets no one anywhere.
http://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=13&article=925
I wish someone did post something nice on recovering data from a hard drive effectively.
FUCK recovery companies.
It'd be fine for older drives, but the newer ones would likely be the problems since the huge densities of the data would need high-precision heads.
Ironic that older drives seem to last longer than these cheap crap-drives of today.
Why? Everything he/she said is true. Just because you don't believe it or believe that it doesn't happen "to anyone" does not make the OP crazy or an idiot. The OP is informed and is attempting to share knowledge. I don't understand why you (or anyone else) wouldn't appreciate that enough at least to refrain from disrespecting him/her. Obviously you don't have a clue as to how espionage works, or the fact that it even occurs on a daily basis. You'd likely be similarly in disbelieve to hear the monolithic amount of information China has collected on every aspect of North American life.
Dude, you're so naive. You've totally underestimated the extent of the problem.
They anticipated that some people would get wind of the covert monitoring, and took steps to ensure those people walked right back into their arms. Don't you know that RMS is a buried mole? He's put an exploitable back door in the friggin GPL itself!
And don't even get me started on Reynold's quantum tunneled molecular aluminum circuitry hack! There's a reason they switched away from tin.
So you're bitching about bitching? (Recursive) bitching gets no one anywhere.
Hey, ease up, Zadaz. You'd probably be an irritating asshole if you were a god of death, too.
http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Kelemvor
:::The Spear in the heart of the Other is the Spear in the heart of You; You are He - Surak of Vulcan:::
He's speaking in the bitch's native language so he'll understand better.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Problem is, this one's the 4th. Who knows how much inbreeding occurred.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm a tech writer, and years ago, on a project, I had a dialog box in a project that had a bunch of tabs. In the help, I put screenshots of each tab. If you were looking at the help for tab "A" and clicked on tab "B," "C," D," etc. in the project, the help for that page would come up, and the screenshots were aligned with one another. Anyway, if you clicked the "Help" button in the screenshot on one and only one of the tabs (in the help, mind you), we jumped to a new page with a picture of the entire doc team and our names. The head of the doc team knew - he was even in the picture - but I don't think anyone else in management knew. There was one SE who knew, and she used to demonstrate it for easily-amused customers.
Now who else will admit to their Easter Eggs?
I hope he's burning in Hell right now.
As editorial markup, "sic" (Latin for "thus") is enclosed in square brackets, not parentheses:
-- http://www.dailywritingtips.com/what-does-sic-mean/, emphasis mine
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
It reminds me about the easter egg in the Thomson's MO6 ROM, when you pressed the keys M, O and 6 simultaneously:
http://cyberpingui.free.fr/mo6.htm
Since it's from 1985, it's a little bit older than Apple's one.
after dumping Apple Mac SE ROM images from a roadside Motorolla (sic) [sic] 68000-era Macintosh [blah blah blah]
I think you meant "[sic]", not "(sic)" ;)
And since the summary is eldavojohn's own words, and not a quote from the article, why should he have to repeat their mistakes?
You can see in TFA that they misspell Motorola with two ells.
Did they? Where?
Not cool.
Not not cool, just not anal.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
There's also 2 jpegs of the dev team inside the quadra 840av ROMs. I stumbled across it disassembling it a few years ago, then google searched and others had found it.
colored flags that wave in a breeze that follows your mouse, IIRC
Someone handed you a Macintosh Classic with a corrupted OS and no system discs?
Turn it on and hold down Command-Option-X-O. There's a fully bootable copy of System 6 in the ROM.
Yes.. except people who read the article know it's just a reference the hackers used when dumping the ROMs.
[sic], indeed.
This is a nice piece of (presumed true) trivia from an AC. Does a ROM-bootable copy of an OS hold implications for security recovery today?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
AC replied below, but yes, look how the mood has changed, what used to be a fun programmer's trick when computing was all shiny and new is now a Back Door Security Threat.
Somewhere in that process of loss-of-innocence is how we as a race are struggling, because I don't see us going back to that worldview. I guarantee you (mostly) no one thought of "international hackers" in the 1980's when we were doing cute little tricks like that on Commodores and old Macs and early PC's etc.
Fast Forward to 2012. There's stuff going on, but it just doesn't have the child-like feel of the 1980's innocence.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Here's an easter egg just for /.'ers. Or is it malware from a black-hatter? Oooh, living life on the edge, what will you do? Clicking on this link may supply you with a happy reward! Or, will it launch an unstoppable game of Thermonucleur War? Decisions, decisions..... http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=KcuDdPo0WZk