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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
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.
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?
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.
Nobody Seems To Notice and Nobody Seems To Care - Government & Stealth Malware
In Response To Slashdot Article: Former Pentagon Analyst: China Has Backdoors To 80% of Telecoms 87
How many rootkits does the US[2] use officially or unofficially?
How much of the free but proprietary software in the US spies on you?
Which software would that be?
Visit any of the top freeware sites in the US, count the number of thousands or millions of downloads of free but proprietary software, much of it works, again on a proprietary Operating System, with files stored or in transit.
How many free but proprietary programs have you downloaded and scanned entire hard drives, flash drives, and other media? Do you realize you are giving these types of proprietary programs complete access to all of your computer's files on the basis of faith alone?
If you are an atheist, the comparison is that you believe in code you cannot see to detect and contain malware on the basis of faith! So you do believe in something invisible to you, don't you?
I'm now going to touch on a subject most anti-malware, commercial or free, developers will DELETE on most of their forums or mailing lists:
APT malware infecting and remaining in BIOS, on PCI and AGP devices, in firmware, your router (many routers are forced to place backdoors in their firmware for their government) your NIC, and many other devices.
Where are the commercial or free anti-malware organizations and individual's products which hash and compare in the cloud and scan for malware for these vectors? If you post on mailing lists or forums of most anti-malware organizations about this threat, one of the following actions will apply: your post will be deleted and/or moved to a hard to find or 'deleted/junk posts' forum section, someone or a team of individuals will mock you in various forms 'tin foil hat', 'conspiracy nut', and my favorite, 'where is the proof of these infections?' One only needs to search Google for these threats and they will open your malware world view to a much larger arena of malware on devices not scanned/supported by the scanners from these freeware sites. This point assumed you're using the proprietary Microsoft Windows OS. Now, let's move on to Linux.
The rootkit scanners for Linux are few and poor. If you're lucky, you'll know how to use chkrootkit (but you can use strings and other tools for analysis) and show the strings of binaries on your installation, but the results are dependent on your capability of deciphering the output and performing further analysis with various tools or in an environment such as Remnux Linux. None of these free scanners scan the earlier mentioned areas of your PC, either! Nor do they detect many of the hundreds of trojans and rootkits easily available on popular websites and the dark/deep web.
Compromised defenders of Linux will look down their nose at you (unless they are into reverse engineering malware/bad binaries, Google for this and Linux and begin a valuable education!) and respond with a similar tone, if they don't call you a noob or point to verifying/downloading packages in a signed repo/original/secure source or checking hashes, they will jump to conspiracy type labels, ignore you, lock and/or shuffle the thread, or otherwise lead you astray from learning how to examine bad binaries. The world of Linux is funny in this way, and I've been a part of it for many years. The majority of Linux users, like the Windows users, will go out of their way to lead you and say anything other than pointing you to information readily available on detailed binary file analysis.
Don't let them get you down, the information is plenty and out there, some from some well known publishers of Linux/Unix books. Search, learn, and share the information on detecting and picking through bad binaries. But this still will not touch the void of the APT malware described above which will survive any wipe of r/w media. I'm convinced, on both *nix and Windows, these pieces of APT malware
Easter Eggs have been around long before computers - there are even some hidden in the Bible
(at least in the King James Version Psalm 46
..."back door"?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
[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