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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."
Let's even consider that they aren't malicious, but simply untested. It's a bunch of code that's possibly vulnerable to an exploit.
...So? You take this risk anytime you use closed source software (or anytime you don't view the source of an open source software program, and your compiler, etc.)
How do you know your web browser right now doesn't have malware built in? After all, have you read the entire source for Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Internet Explorer/Opera for the exact version you are using?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
My first easter egg was in the old Atari console game "Adventure". If you found a hidden room and carried a magic one-pixel sprite (dot) into that room, it displayed the name of the programmer.
Of course once Atari learned about it they had a fit because they wanted programmers to remain anonymous, and that's one of the reasons four programmers quit Atari and founded Activision. They wanted name credit for their artistic creations.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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'.
A compression routine that would allow the machine code to fit in the 256kb to begin with?
The ROMs of old world Macs were execute-in-place, meaning they didn't need to be copied to RAM first. Adding compression would require 412 KiB of RAM to hold the decompressed machine code. At the time, that was considered a huge chunk of RAM for a computer like the Mac.
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.
It's a shame isn't it? We have to forgo these fun little tit-bits for these sorts of issues.
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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".
Um, no. Easter eggs and malware are completely separate camps. By the time you hit upon an easter egg, you've already committed to trusting a progammer's intentions and work quality. Discovering he or she has a sense of humor too does not cause injury to you. By the same token, a virus is a virus, even if it plays a cute animation.
While you imply that we should regard easter eggs with a certain suspicion, I gather what's really making you uncomfortable is the fact that there's hidden functionality in that binary you're running. Guess what... easter eggs or not, most software is loaded with hidden functionality: easter eggs, diagnostic functions, test code, old screens, unused modules, compatibility modes, experimental features, platform-specific and customer-specific hacks, and, yes, sometimes malware. Easter eggs have merely made you reexamine some false assumptions you had.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Oh bullshit. Did everyone forget the Quake 3 malware that sat in the repos for a year and a fricking half? For something that is INSANELY popular like Firefox then MAYBE, just maybe, you've had a couple of dozen guys that aren't the actual devs look at the thing. For the rest, the bazillion little packages that make up your average distro that nobody ever seems to even think about until it breaks? Not a chance. Tell me have YOU gone through the FF source code? How about the Libre Office source? If the answer is no then WTF makes you think anybody else has?
Just because something CAN be done does not mean it HAS been done, there is a difference. Finally have you looked at some of the source for the obfuscated C contest entries? With that you know ahead of time there is malware in it yet many devs here would be hard pressed to find it, so what makes you think that on code where nobody knows if it has or hasn't and aren't expecting to find anything nasty that you or anyone else would spot the bug if it were obfuscated and hidden among a half a million lines of code?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.