Certain key OS X application binaries are encrypted using AES. Among these applications are the SystemUIServer, the loginwindow, the Finder, the Dock, and translated (Rosetta). If you can't decrypt these applications, you can't run OS X. OS X has a kernel extension, which is amusingly named "Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext", that determines if OS X is running on Apple hardware and, if it is, allows the system to decrypt the binaries. (source: http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter7/binaryprotection/)
The key here is that "Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext" is not using the TPM chip to determine if it's running on Apple hardware. At least, that's not the only thing it checks. It can't be because not all Intel Macs have the TPM chip:
At the time of this writing (October 2006), the newest Apple computer models, such as the MacPro and possibly the revised MacBook Pro and the revised iMac, do not contain an onboard Infineon TPM. Apple could bring the TPM back, perhaps, if there were enough interest (after all, it is increasingly common to find TPMs in current notebook computers), but that's another story.
None of this means that I disagree with the rest of your post. I hate that Apple promotes DRM from one side of its mouth while condemning it with the other. Would Apple be dominating the MP3 player and online music markets without DRM? It's possible, but the locked-in ecosystem they've created clearly benefits from the presence of DRM (and, incidentally, is the reason I'm an eMusic subscriber).
It's true, the outcry over Apple's inclusion of a TPM chip in some of their computers wasn't quite as loud as it would be if Microsoft tried the same thing; however, to claim that "no-one so much as mentions it here" is blatantly false. You are, after all, posting in response to a message that was in response to a message that linked to an article that mentioned TPM (enough indirections there? The point is, TPM was mentioned). That said, if you read the article I posted, -- and I'm not criticizing, because I skipped directly the executive summary myself -- you may have seen this paragraph:
At the time of this writing (October 2006), the newest Apple computer models, such as the MacPro and possibly the revised MacBook Pro and the revised iMac, do not contain an onboard Infineon TPM. Apple could bring the TPM back, perhaps, if there were enough interest (after all, it is increasingly common to find TPMs in current notebook computers), but that's another story.
Granted, there's no way to tell if this move was in response to the comparatively-quiet outcry over the presence of the TPM chip, a simple cost-cutting measure, or something else entirely, but the fact that Apple is shipping computers that lack the chip indicates that their intentions for it are somewhat less evil than originally advertised.
Accoring to this article, your article is mistaken. There was a lot of noise about Apple using the TPM chip to keep people from running OS X on non-Apple hardware, but it turns out that simply isn't the case. The TPM chip is there, but Apple doesn't even ship a driver for it.
Executive Summary
Regardless of what the media has been harping on for a long time, and regardless of what system attackers have been saying about the "evil TPM protection" Apple uses, Apple is doing no TPM-related evil thing. In fact, Apple is doing no TPM-related cryptographic thing at all in Mac OS X. Yes, I know, there has been much talk of "TPM keys" and such, but there are no TPM keys that Apple is hiding somewhere.
More specifically, Apple simply does not use the TPM hardware. In Apple computer models that do contain a TPM, the hardware is available for use by the machine's owner. Of course, to use it you need a device driver, which Apple indeed doesn't provide.
I am releasing an open source TPM driver for Mac OS X, along with Mac OS X versions of popular open source trusted computing software from the Linux world. No reverse engineering was required to write this driver.
The driver and the software stack together make (a form of) trusted computing possible on Mac OS X, assuming you have a machine with a TPM. This page shows you how to "take ownership" of the TPM and begin using it.
For crying out loud, Intel's Trusted Execution Technology (a.k.a. LaGrande) does not mean you start putting TPMs "inside the CPU". Apple isn't shipping CPUs with "built-in TPMs."
I'm a filthy, Clinton-loving liberal and even I'm tired of hearing about how Bill got in trouble for getting a BJ. He got was investigated for being a serial sexual harasser (among other things) and was impeached for lying under oath. He's a scum bag. A charismatic scum bag. And I'd vote for him again if I could.
I think the parent post is trying to say that you don't have to go through a menu system to change the volume on an iPod. When music is playing, the wheel becomes a volume knob. Move a finger clockwise around the wheel and the volume goes up. Move it counter-clockwise and the volume goes down.
Do you really want to associate yourself with 13 year old, eyeliner-wearing, wannabe vampires? If not, don't use the word "sheeple". It isn't edgy. It isn't funny. It's just dumb.
Oh. So if my treo is acting up because of my third party apps, all I need to do is remove the battery, find the button behind it, and press and hold that button in unison with another button on the opposite side of the case? What could be simpler?
I read this as sarcasm. If it wasn't intended to be read that way, ignore the rest of this post.
Holding two buttons down is hardly rocket science. It sounds to me like you tried to make it sound complicated but failed to do even that. I agree that it's not blindingly obvious, but I would maintain that an action as destructive as a complete reset of the phone's memory should require a complicated gesture. It's not something you want to happen accidentally. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that it's no big deal if the user has to call tech support to figure it out. At least, that's far better than having the user call tech support to figure out why his phone randomly lost all of its contents while sitting idly in his pocket.
For Xenu's sake, listen to yourself! You're so desensitized to the awful experience and software quality of modern phones that you think the battery-removal dance is a positive experience!
You're right... it's not easy and it's not intuitive. I'm just not sure why you seem to be citing Apple as an example of a company that gets this right -- the iPod reset sequence is center button + menu for 5 or more seconds, which is hardly obvious.
A good interface should make easy things easy and hard things possible. It should also prevent rare, highly destructive actions from happening accidentally. Hiding the trigger for such an action behind a battery seems pretty smart to me.
That said, I agree that the software on most mobile phones sucks and I think Apple has probably trumped them all.
Keep in mind that some applications won't need to touch the network at all. I imagine many games could get by with just DHTML and JavaScript. Has Apple announced if it will be possible to save data to the local storage? If so, that could enable a fairly large class of iPhone "applications" to run directly from the flash memory (possibly at the expense of privacy & security, of course).
Dude, you're posting on Slashdot. Plus, most gadgety-types (i.e., people who buy smartphones) like the ability to install applications (i.e., games). You can spin it any way you want to, but the lack of an SDK is not good for the iPhone. It probably won't kill the product -- especially if the iPhone can run JavaScript+DHTML widgets from memory -- but it won't help much either.
To the grand-parent: Very few people know how well the iPhone performs in any respect. It's still very much a wait-and-see kind of product.
To parent: I have Cingular/AT&T and I've never had a problem with call quality. It's a phone, not a hi-fi.
Do you want a pat on the back? Ok, here ya go:
Nice fucking job, dude! Way to buy that cell phone! You totally stuck it to the man!
There. Now will you shut up?
The human ear is capable of detecting sound in the 20 - 20,000Hz range. Nyquist's theorem states that "Exact reconstruction of a continuous-time baseband signal from its samples is possible if the signal is bandlimited and the sampling frequency is greater than twice the signal bandwidth." Thus we arrive at the 44,100Hz sampling rate found in CDs (22,500 * 2 -- they bumped the upper range a bit, but those ungrateful audiophiles still aren't happy).
If it integrates with the Google web site the same way Google Desktop Search does on Windows (and I'm sure it will), than this will be an indispensable app for me. Ever since I discovered the ability to search browser history in GDS for Windows, Spotlight's inability to do so has annoyed me.
I don't care about the rest of the stuff. I have a Gmail account, but I enabled POP3 a long time ago so I could use Mail.app to get all of my email. That means that I already have Spotlight indexing for Gmail.
Hopefully Spotlight will grow the ability to search browser history when Leopard comes out.
Hell, most kids today easily would never recognize a single Fleetwood Mac or Beatles song... they'd recognize Beethoven's Fifth however.
This is such crap. Nearly every kid in the US would recognize "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "Ticket to Ride". "A Hard Day's Night"? "Help!"? "Yellow Submarine"? "With a Little Help from My Friends"? "Eleanor Rigby"? "Strawberry Fields"? I could go on. Maybe they wouldn't know those songs are by The Beatles, but I think you're drastically overestimating the number of people that would be able to identify the composer of Beethoven's Fifth (in fact, I bet if you posed the question, "Who wrote Beethoven's Fifth?" to 10 random people on the street, you'd still get at least 2 wrong answers).
It's no wonder these artists have to become addicted to vice - they know deep inside their lives are worthless and they have abused their Apollian gifts to corrupt the masses instead of improving them.
Errr... right. This is clearly a pop-music phenomenon. Because Mozart wasn't depraved at all.
THe Beatles became famous because record company executives bribed radio stations around the world to play the crap constantly.
I'll give you that. The Beatles were the most innovative band of the 20th century, but they may have remained underground like The Velvet, uh, Underground if they hadn't been so marketable.
The drug culture aspect was in addition to a panacia to the despair of these artists, an inducement to the nihilistic children of the post-war world.
I'm sorry, but I can't parse a coherent thought from this sentence.
In short - the artists can never be proteted. They are used like the animals they are, and always have been.
Hip-hop is on the decline
And who's loss is that? All it did was take pieces from earlier songs, tear them apart and have some bloke talking over it.
That looks like fun. Let me try:
Rock and roll is on the decline
And who's loss is that? All it did was take ridiculously simple guitar melodies and have some whiny teenager cry about his girlfriend over it.
Generalizing to this degree only makes you sound ignorant. For the record, I like rock and roll as well as rap. That's not to say that I like all music from those genres. To the contrary, I think the majority from both is shit, but I also think that there's good music to be found in all genres.
I also think that there are some very innovative uses of sampling (i.e. taking pieces from earlier songs and tearing them apart), but if I hear another rap song that's just a drum track over the theme song from "Knight Rider", I'm going to scream.
Lots of BitTorrent clients will let you select which files you want to download. I know for a fact that Azureus does this. Of course, if the contents are in a RAR file this isn't much help. Which is why you should never RAR a torrent.
Slashdot Mirror
Certain key OS X application binaries are encrypted using AES. Among these applications are the SystemUIServer, the loginwindow, the Finder, the Dock, and translated (Rosetta). If you can't decrypt these applications, you can't run OS X. OS X has a kernel extension, which is amusingly named "Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext", that determines if OS X is running on Apple hardware and, if it is, allows the system to decrypt the binaries. (source: http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter7/binaryprotection/)
The key here is that "Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext" is not using the TPM chip to determine if it's running on Apple hardware. At least, that's not the only thing it checks. It can't be because not all Intel Macs have the TPM chip:
Taken from http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/None of this means that I disagree with the rest of your post. I hate that Apple promotes DRM from one side of its mouth while condemning it with the other. Would Apple be dominating the MP3 player and online music markets without DRM? It's possible, but the locked-in ecosystem they've created clearly benefits from the presence of DRM (and, incidentally, is the reason I'm an eMusic subscriber).
Executive Summary
- Regardless of what the media has been harping on for a long time, and regardless of what system attackers have been saying about the "evil TPM protection" Apple uses, Apple is doing no TPM-related evil thing. In fact, Apple is doing no TPM-related cryptographic thing at all in Mac OS X. Yes, I know, there has been much talk of "TPM keys" and such, but there are no TPM keys that Apple is hiding somewhere.
- More specifically, Apple simply does not use the TPM hardware. In Apple computer models that do contain a TPM, the hardware is available for use by the machine's owner. Of course, to use it you need a device driver, which Apple indeed doesn't provide.
- I am releasing an open source TPM driver for Mac OS X, along with Mac OS X versions of popular open source trusted computing software from the Linux world. No reverse engineering was required to write this driver.
- The driver and the software stack together make (a form of) trusted computing possible on Mac OS X, assuming you have a machine with a TPM. This page shows you how to "take ownership" of the TPM and begin using it.
- For crying out loud, Intel's Trusted Execution Technology (a.k.a. LaGrande) does not mean you start putting TPMs "inside the CPU". Apple isn't shipping CPUs with "built-in TPMs."
(emphasis mine).Wow. The second sentence of my reply couldn't have been more on target.
Go back to your anime and stop ruining my childhood memories. Tool.
The might as well change it to IPOD. Actually, that would be pretty cool.
I'm a filthy, Clinton-loving liberal and even I'm tired of hearing about how Bill got in trouble for getting a BJ. He got was investigated for being a serial sexual harasser (among other things) and was impeached for lying under oath. He's a scum bag. A charismatic scum bag. And I'd vote for him again if I could.
I think the parent post is trying to say that you don't have to go through a menu system to change the volume on an iPod. When music is playing, the wheel becomes a volume knob. Move a finger clockwise around the wheel and the volume goes up. Move it counter-clockwise and the volume goes down.
Nope. Why don't you come up with an original term? I mean, seeing as how you're so independent and non-conformist and what not.
Do you really want to associate yourself with 13 year old, eyeliner-wearing, wannabe vampires? If not, don't use the word "sheeple". It isn't edgy. It isn't funny. It's just dumb.
I read this as sarcasm. If it wasn't intended to be read that way, ignore the rest of this post.
Holding two buttons down is hardly rocket science. It sounds to me like you tried to make it sound complicated but failed to do even that. I agree that it's not blindingly obvious, but I would maintain that an action as destructive as a complete reset of the phone's memory should require a complicated gesture. It's not something you want to happen accidentally. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that it's no big deal if the user has to call tech support to figure it out. At least, that's far better than having the user call tech support to figure out why his phone randomly lost all of its contents while sitting idly in his pocket.
You're right... it's not easy and it's not intuitive. I'm just not sure why you seem to be citing Apple as an example of a company that gets this right -- the iPod reset sequence is center button + menu for 5 or more seconds, which is hardly obvious.
A good interface should make easy things easy and hard things possible. It should also prevent rare, highly destructive actions from happening accidentally. Hiding the trigger for such an action behind a battery seems pretty smart to me.
That said, I agree that the software on most mobile phones sucks and I think Apple has probably trumped them all.
Keep in mind that some applications won't need to touch the network at all. I imagine many games could get by with just DHTML and JavaScript. Has Apple announced if it will be possible to save data to the local storage? If so, that could enable a fairly large class of iPhone "applications" to run directly from the flash memory (possibly at the expense of privacy & security, of course).
Dude, you're posting on Slashdot. Plus, most gadgety-types (i.e., people who buy smartphones) like the ability to install applications (i.e., games). You can spin it any way you want to, but the lack of an SDK is not good for the iPhone. It probably won't kill the product -- especially if the iPhone can run JavaScript+DHTML widgets from memory -- but it won't help much either.
To the grand-parent: Very few people know how well the iPhone performs in any respect. It's still very much a wait-and-see kind of product. To parent: I have Cingular/AT&T and I've never had a problem with call quality. It's a phone, not a hi-fi.
It's not even in the top 10. The summit of Mt. Everest is the highest point on earth.
Do you want a pat on the back? Ok, here ya go: Nice fucking job, dude! Way to buy that cell phone! You totally stuck it to the man! There. Now will you shut up?
I don't think Guitar Hero is for you.
The human ear is capable of detecting sound in the 20 - 20,000Hz range. Nyquist's theorem states that "Exact reconstruction of a continuous-time baseband signal from its samples is possible if the signal is bandlimited and the sampling frequency is greater than twice the signal bandwidth." Thus we arrive at the 44,100Hz sampling rate found in CDs (22,500 * 2 -- they bumped the upper range a bit, but those ungrateful audiophiles still aren't happy).
If it integrates with the Google web site the same way Google Desktop Search does on Windows (and I'm sure it will), than this will be an indispensable app for me. Ever since I discovered the ability to search browser history in GDS for Windows, Spotlight's inability to do so has annoyed me. I don't care about the rest of the stuff. I have a Gmail account, but I enabled POP3 a long time ago so I could use Mail.app to get all of my email. That means that I already have Spotlight indexing for Gmail. Hopefully Spotlight will grow the ability to search browser history when Leopard comes out.
Yeah. The music you listen to is way cooler.
Lots of BitTorrent clients will let you select which files you want to download. I know for a fact that Azureus does this. Of course, if the contents are in a RAR file this isn't much help. Which is why you should never RAR a torrent.