Comment by nwh
13 years ago
There's been balmy little bits of stuff like this all the way through OSX and iOS for ages, though maybe not quite as flippant.
Every Mac has the kernel extension "Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext" for example, which loads into RAM a short poem.
There once was was a user that whined
his existing OS was so blind,
he'd do better to pirate
an OS that ran great
but found his hardware declined.
Please don't steal Mac OS!
Really, that's way uncool.
That .kext is also responsible for verifying some sort of signature in a hardware chip only present on genuine macs. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93Intel_architectur...
This used to be the case, but no longer is; Apple stopped using the TPM in Intel macs shortly after they launched[1] and have not brought it back since.
DSMOS.kext has another function, however; it is involved in Apple's binary protection scheme[2] for certain OSX binaries. Essentially, OSX ships with certain important binaries (such as loginwindow, SystemUIServer, Finder, and Dock) that have certain vm pages encrypted. Decrypting these pages for use requires DSMOS.kext.
[1]: http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/ [2]: http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter7/binaryprotection/
Yes, and before it will perform the decryption, it needs the correct "SmcDeviceKey", so I think my point still stands :)
1 reply →
I wonder if this has (or had had) some legal significance.
I remember some issues with the Apple II rom being copied and that they had to add a "Copyright Apple" or something similar to the binary data.
They added stuff to the Mac ROMs in reaction to the copying of Apple II ROMs. See http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Stolen_From_Apple...
The idea is that this poem is copyrighted as a creative work, and therefore Apple can control its distribution. The actual key contains a copyright message after the poem.
If I recall correctly, they added a watermark to the ROM. The concern was that as adversary could modify the code to make it difficult to prove that it was actually a copy. The watermark was a hidden section of the code which could be executed to demonstrate that the code did in fact originate from Apple.
If anyone can confirm/deny this, please do.
Reminds me of VAX chips during the Cold War. They had "When you care enough to steal the best etched on the chip in Cyrillic.
http://popularlogistics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/cvax1...
I can definitely understand that, having pulled and Android app from the store because of piracy recently. (in app purchase is really hard to circumvent by pirates, but apps where you pay upfront are pirated like crazy)
How does pulling the app from the store benefit you?
By re-releasing it again as a free app with in-app purchase (which is very hard to pirate)
You can't change a paid app to free on the Google Play store. All you can do is to pull it, and submit it again.
2 replies →
Didn't Jobs say "Great Artists Steal."?
Users who are artists must heed these wise words.
All Hail the Cult Leader.
As for this "poem", I've seen better from kids in elementary school. This speaks to the creative aptitude of Apple's kernel engineers. Certainly not the strongpoint of their workforce.
What sort of royalties or up-front payments did CMU get for letting Apple use their kernel?
It's actually very nifty - if you use a "secret"(obscure) key or checksum to check authenticity of hardware, then it still could be legally duplicated as nothing before DMCA was passed would prohibit that. If you use a scrappy poem as that key/token... then it's clearly copyrightable, and its duplication by some other manufacturer can be restricted with ages-old laws.
Do you have a citation for the cases where Apple has successfully argued used this in court against some other party who was pirating OSX?
It's only "nifty" until it's put to the test and fails in court. It's "effective" as a way to protect software only in the minds of some Apple engineers; but a judge might not see it that way. There's no precedent to assure anyone that it would work. If there were, I suspect we'd see it in widespread use. Or maybe Apple has tried to patent it?
Perhaps the DMCA exists because "nifty" gimmicks like this one cannot be relied on?
Nice try.
Every Maccard on the planet seems to think pirating OS X is an oh so terrible thing to do (to the point that parent post is bringing up poems about it like its a cute, non-weird thing). At the same time pirating everything else on the planet seemingly is OK.
I've never understood the rationale behind this.
Keep in mind I'm a software developer myself and run strictly non-pirated software, and open-source as much as possible. You could never make me replace a Linux desktop with a limited OS X experience, and I see no reason what so ever to put in the effort to pirate it.
But why is it worse to pirate a OS with bad hardware-support out of the box than pirating... say Microsoft Office? I'm just curious what's up with that.
>Every Maccard on the planet seems to think pirating OS X is an oh so terrible thing to do
First, who are those "Maccards" you are reffering to? Perhaps you meant to say "OS X user" or "persons who likes Apple stuff".
Second, a lot of us OS X user could not care less if you pirated OS X or not. Matter of fact, I know several people with genuine Macs that also run a Hackintosh (and I experimented with one a while ago).
>(to the point that parent post is bringing up poems about it like its a cute, non-weird thing).
The poem is placed by Apple developers, inside the OS X internels. IIRC, it's loaded in a .kext (a kernel extension). That's cute, especially it being a flippant poem and not some 20 page long legal text. In essense, it's a small easter egg.
It's not like random Apple users write poems about not pirating OS X, which seems to be your impression.
>At the same time pirating everything else on the planet seemingly is OK.
"Maccards think pirating OS X is very bad" (wrong) "At the same time pirating everything else on the planet seemingly is OK" (wrong again).
Even if "Maccards" (sic) thought that pirating OS X is bad, who told you it's the same persons that think pirating everything else is OK?
>I've never understood the rationale behind this.
The problem might be that what you believe goes on is not happening in the first place.
As an Android developer I had many discussions with Apple users/devs but I never heard anyone say something like that.
In my experience Mac users tend to be quite scrupulous about paying for their software.
Apart from their Adobe suites... (In my experience).
Note that I don't have any pirated software on my machine. Running Debian here.
With OS X there's no license key you need to enter, they have a poem instead asking you not to steal it. That's a nice thing, rather than assuming you're going to steal it they have a poem to jokingly ask you otherwise.
Sure, no license key, except for the key used to decrypt protected binaries only on authorized hardware.
There is a license "key", it's the whole computer.
13 replies →
They also have it (somewhat) tied to the hardware, which reduces the threat of piracy in the first place.
I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. From your tone I suspect you're simply biased against Macs.
What is a Maccard? I've never heard anyone say that pirating OS X was more ok than any other kind of piracy.
I guess it's something like a Wintard/Lintard - only with more disposable income.
1 reply →
I thought it was Mactard.
3 replies →
Maccard = Mac user.
And the attitude I've seen (especially in the OSX 86 community) is that general piracy is completely OK, but you have to buy OS X from Apple, otherwise you are doing something super-duper wrong. Then they move on to pirate Photoshop.
It's a mind-bending sort of ethics, and I was curious about what the reasoning behind it was.
5 replies →