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"Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple’s radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple’s file sys

"Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple’s radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that." Can anyone throw more context around this hack. Technical challenges to accomplish this will be bonus.

VMG 15y ago
I'd be interested to know the meaning of the sentence. How do you hack a file system to display a logo?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - JonnieCache 15y ago
    What? Why on earth would you think that? As others have said, it's the icons in finder. "Hacking the filesystem" makes it sound more drastic than it is, they have worked out how to bend the extensive HFS+ metadata system to their will. They are not monkeying around with the storage of the actual data, that would be crazy.
- Timothee 15y ago
  I'm assuming they're talking about the Dropbox logo that is displayed on the Dropbox folder and/or the sync icons displayed on the files and folders inside the Dropbox folder, functions which are likely reserved to the default System folders.
kitsune_ 15y ago
http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=12498 http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=12498 "more pertinent is the fact that none of the integrations we do with the Finder are actually supported by Apple. this means that it takes significant reverse engineering of the Finder to make icon overlays/contextual menu items to work. Apple completely removed support for contextual menu items in SL (it's possible to have right click options, but it's not possible to have a submenu, or a submenu with options that change dynamically based on context). in order to make these integrations work we have to inject code into the finder to make in memory replacements of finder code with our own (many complexities/details of hackery omitted). if it were easy, you'd see more products than just Dropbox able to do it ;-)" also: http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=938 http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=938
- rkudeshi 15y ago
  I had no idea installing Dropbox meant they were modifying the Finder. Why isn't there an option to disable this?
  - JonnieCache 15y ago
    Note that they are injecting code into the running Finder process, which is very different from patching the Finder binary. That would be very bad.
    - jcurbo 15y ago
      This would also break the code signing for Finder, I believe. (also bad)
    - simplekoala 15y ago
      They are injecting code into running Finder process? Hmmm, so they figured one of the jump instructions target address in Finder process ( for a function invocation, most likely the code to show the pop-up), and changed that location to jump to a different address where they injected their code? Don't you need root privileges to muck with Finder's process space? I see dropbox process running with non-privileged uid. Wonder, how they managed to change the VMM space of Finder process to inject code. Any thoughts? Please correct me, if I am totally off the mark here.
      - JonnieCache 15y ago
        I think there are some hooks in OSX/Cocoa for doing this, although I don't claim to actually understand it. There is the SIMBL system which people used to write native plugins for Safari, I guess that's probably stopped since it has an actual extension framework now. http://www.culater.net/software/SIMBL/SIMBL.php http://www.culater.net/software/SIMBL/SIMBL.php Then there's TotalFinder, which uses in-memory patching to add tabs and all sorts of other leet stuff into Finder. I highly recommend it. In their docs they say it works similarly to SIMBL. http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/ http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/
pingswept 15y ago
Also, what the devil is "an Apple SWAT team"? I know this is an article in Forbes, but does it even sort of exist?
- profitbaron 15y ago
  There's some information on them here: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/05/business/la-fi-silicon-police-20100505 http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/05/business/la-fi-silic...

VMG 15y ago

I'd be interested to know the meaning of the sentence. How do you hack a file system to display a logo?

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- JonnieCache 15y ago
  What? Why on earth would you think that? As others have said, it's the icons in finder. "Hacking the filesystem" makes it sound more drastic than it is, they have worked out how to bend the extensive HFS+ metadata system to their will. They are not monkeying around with the storage of the actual data, that would be crazy.
Timothee 15y ago
I'm assuming they're talking about the Dropbox logo that is displayed on the Dropbox folder and/or the sync icons displayed on the files and folders inside the Dropbox folder, functions which are likely reserved to the default System folders.

kitsune_ 15y ago

http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=12498 http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=12498 "more pertinent is the fact that none of the integrations we do with the Finder are actually supported by Apple. this means that it takes significant reverse engineering of the Finder to make icon overlays/contextual menu items to work. Apple completely removed support for contextual menu items in SL (it's possible to have right click options, but it's not possible to have a submenu, or a submenu with options that change dynamically based on context). in order to make these integrations work we have to inject code into the finder to make in memory replacements of finder code with our own (many complexities/details of hackery omitted). if it were easy, you'd see more products than just Dropbox able to do it ;-)" also: http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=938 http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=938

rkudeshi 15y ago
I had no idea installing Dropbox meant they were modifying the Finder. Why isn't there an option to disable this?
- JonnieCache 15y ago
  Note that they are injecting code into the running Finder process, which is very different from patching the Finder binary. That would be very bad.
  - jcurbo 15y ago
    This would also break the code signing for Finder, I believe. (also bad)
  - simplekoala 15y ago
    They are injecting code into running Finder process? Hmmm, so they figured one of the jump instructions target address in Finder process ( for a function invocation, most likely the code to show the pop-up), and changed that location to jump to a different address where they injected their code? Don't you need root privileges to muck with Finder's process space? I see dropbox process running with non-privileged uid. Wonder, how they managed to change the VMM space of Finder process to inject code. Any thoughts? Please correct me, if I am totally off the mark here.
    - JonnieCache 15y ago
      I think there are some hooks in OSX/Cocoa for doing this, although I don't claim to actually understand it. There is the SIMBL system which people used to write native plugins for Safari, I guess that's probably stopped since it has an actual extension framework now. http://www.culater.net/software/SIMBL/SIMBL.php http://www.culater.net/software/SIMBL/SIMBL.php Then there's TotalFinder, which uses in-memory patching to add tabs and all sorts of other leet stuff into Finder. I highly recommend it. In their docs they say it works similarly to SIMBL. http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/ http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/

pingswept 15y ago

Also, what the devil is "an Apple SWAT team"? I know this is an article in Forbes, but does it even sort of exist?

profitbaron 15y ago
There's some information on them here: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/05/business/la-fi-silicon-police-20100505 http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/05/business/la-fi-silic...