55 ms·

The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

844 points by waxpancake 3y ago

DominoTree 3y ago
This is worse than that time they gave everyone a U2 album
websap 3y ago
[flagged]
jaimehrubiks 3y ago
This is very likely because of this https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/06/29/uk-court-orders-bitcoinorg-to-remove-white-paper-following-craig-wright-lawsuit/ https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/06/29/uk-court-orders-...?
- paulgb 3y ago
  The dates don’t check out; waxy confirmed it goes back to at least 2019 but that story is from 2021.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- eis 3y ago
  How could it be that versions of MacOS released in 2019 have the paper due to a court case from 2021? Even ignoring the temporal issue I really can't see any plausible connection.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jaimehrubiks 3y ago
    You can check that he got the US copyright for the bitcoin whitepaper in 2019 https://cryptobriefing.com/us-grants-craig-wright-copyright-on-original-bitcoin-whitepaper/ https://cryptobriefing.com/us-grants-craig-wright-copyright-... https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-creator-craig-s-wright-satoshi-nakamoto-granted-us-copyright-registrations-for-bitcoin-white-paper-and-code/ https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-creator-craig-s-wright-satoshi-... That explains the temporal issue. Then, for the connection, I remember a lot of people on the internet reacted negatively on that news given that they don't agree that he should have ownership for that document as he never proved to be satoshi. I could see Apple or an employee inject that document in a way to "challenge" or "protest".
    - gst 3y ago
      The quoted CoinGeek site is owned by Calvin Ayre who works together with Craig Wright. All their BSV related articles are very one-sided and extremely biased. A more objective viewpoint is directly available from the US copyright office at https://www.copyright.gov/press-media-info/press-updates.html https://www.copyright.gov/press-media-info/press-updates.htm... - see the entry with the title "May 22, 2019: Questions about Certain Bitcoin Registrations". Basically he registered a copyright, but this does not mean that he "got" the copyright, as the copyright office does not verify authorship and as it's possible for multiple adverse claims to exist.
lawxls 3y ago
[flagged]
- cududa 3y ago
  How does impact bitcoin in any way at all
  - likecarter 3y ago
    It’s satire.
    - pcthrowaway 3y ago
      I'm not convinced it is. Poe's Law
      - jancsika 3y ago
        There should be a Bitcoin Satire Impossibility Law. Posts about Bitcoin that look like satire either a) oh boy are they not satire or b) will soon be interpreted acted on in earnest by Bitcoin zealots anyway. E.g., Dogecoin. Rest assured there is a gaggle of Bitcoin zealots hitting up reddit et al to spread the word about how good this discovery is for Bitcoin's bottom line! I'd make a joke about Kind Midas here, but in light of BSIL I'm afraid someone here would use the premise as an idea for a startup and end up hurting themselves (or others).
    - m3kw9 3y ago
      It’s all satire
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't do this here.
- Psychoshy_bc1q 3y ago
  based and orangepilled
Animats 3y ago
Is there a Bitcoin miner somewhere in there, too?
- indy 3y ago
  Every iPhone ships with a bitcoin miner. It gets activated once your phone is over a year old.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    I wonder if that would generate a financially significant amount of BTC. Would they ever actually mine a block with that little compute?
    - pas 3y ago
      if the hash rate drops by a sufficient amount, then they could :)
    - lxgr 3y ago
      If nothing else, it'd generate a financially significant amount of USD for Apple :)
    - paxys 3y ago
      In a vacuum, yes. If you account for the fact that a large majority of people would get pissed with the battery drain and return their phones, no.
  - flenserboy 3y ago
    So it's not the battery going
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Well, how much of that M2 chip do you really need for Netflix, bud?
- INTPenis 3y ago
  Valid questions for any consumer. I love the comments here all so awe struck by this that they don't realize how stupid it is. Literally any PDF document would have served the same purpose, the printer test page could have been enough. But this just reveals that even deep inside Apple development there are cryptobros who don't mind all the millions of dollars that the whole crypto movement has scammed from hard working gullible people.
RajT88 3y ago
If this shipped in 2013, or earlier, it would really be something. 2019? Nah.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kris-nova 3y ago
I would be willing to wager there is more inside that PDF than just the contents of the Bitcoin white paper. Curious if anyone has a hash sum handy
- greyface- 3y ago
  $ wget https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf [...] $ openssl sha256 bitcoin.pdf SHA256(bitcoin.pdf)= b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553 $ openssl sha256 /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf SHA256(/System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf)= b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553 (Ventura 13.3)
  - birdyrooster 3y ago
    and a universal hash collision attack!? this is amazing stuff from apple
    - eru 3y ago
      They'd also need great compression to put more inside the pdf.
- ehPReth 3y ago
  /System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf sha256: b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553 sha512: 2ac531ee521cf93f8419c2018f770fbb42c65396178e079a416e7038d3f9ab9fc2c35c4d838bc8b5dd68f4c13759fe9cdf90a46528412fefe1294cb26beabf4e crc32 (lol): 13af7d06 md5: d56d71ecadf2137be09d8b1d35c6c042 sha1: 8de2fdb04edce612738eb51e14ecc426381f8ed8
  - Vecr 3y ago
    Both the sha256 and sha512 exactly match a copy of the whitepaper from 2017, so that would be a pretty sophisticated attack.
gardenhedge 3y ago
Confirmed on my MacBook bought in 2015 and on version macOS Catalina Version 10.15.1 Cool.
- flir 3y ago
  It's on this Mojave 10.14.6 machine too. The internet says that's Sep 26, 2019.
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    I can confirm the PDF is not present on OS X 10.9 Mavericks. So it was added some time between 10.10 and 10.14.
    - blauditore 3y ago
      It was almost certainly added around the hype in 2019.
      - zeven7 3y ago
        2015-2017 and 2021-2022 were hype years. 2018-2020 was dead crypto winter.
      - varenc 3y ago
        On my Mojave machine the files modtime is “ Mon Aug 20 2018”! (Which seems to be straight from macOS, not the date of my install, since the modtime on other macOS system files varies widely)
        __d 3y ago
        On mine, it's Jan 1 2020 (Big Sur, 11.7.4).
        dagmx 3y ago
        That’s roughly the date they’d have done the full world build for the first non-beta release of Mojave based on its actual release date. It’s unlikely it was actually the date of creation
inlined 3y ago
[flagged]
- colesantiago 3y ago
  [flagged]
mdmglr 3y ago
184 KB * how many Macs on earth? I don't mean anything by this, just interesting thought experiment. Was numbers.pdf not enough to accomplish what they wanted? My opinion: I understand the OS is a big multi-team effort but this just not cool. It's not about the contents of the file or that it's about bitcoin. Plain and simple: Don't ship files that don't need to be shipped. All these files, if they are test files, should be in unit/integration test resources.
- reaperman 3y ago
  Back in my day, "easter eggs" used to be cool.
  - mdmglr 3y ago
    How is this pdf cool? Back in my day easter eggs were fun.
    - dingosity 3y ago
      Tech isn't about fun any more. It's about making huge stacks of cash. We used to build things because it was fun and half-way artistic. Now we only build things if we think we can convince a VC to give us cash for it. Though... I suppose this isn't exactly the venue to encourage people to do things simply for the joy of it. [Also... you kids get off my lawn!]
      - eru 3y ago
        > Now we only build things if we think we can convince a VC to give us cash for it. Huh? Just because some person A somewhere builds something for cash, doesn't mean that there's no person B somewhere else building something for fun.
        dingosity 3y ago
        what was the last thing you built for fun?
colesantiago 3y ago
I hope Apple sees this as a bug and removes this in their next major update, hopefully an Apple employee files a radar and gets this removed. This should have never been allowed on macOS, an endorsement of a pyramid scheme, borderline ponzi scheme, incinerating the planet and evading sanctions. I use Linux and macOS and the former would never allow this to happen ever.
- plasticsoprano 3y ago
  How is a hidden file, that was just now stumbled upon 4+ years later, an endorsement?
  - colesantiago 3y ago
    It isn't hidden if it was found with a full path to file and now on full display. By adding it into the main macOS, a sentient being at Apple deliberately chose that file to place it into a major operating system. I consider it an blantant endorsement. I'm questioning Apple's review process because of this. At worst this is akin to malware.
    - ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
      > At worst this is akin to malware. You just don't find this kind of insane overreaction over esoteric matters anywhere else. Love HN.
- mhluongo 3y ago
  > and the former would never allow this to happen ever. Not sure what you mean here. There are many Linux distros...?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - colesantiago 3y ago
    And they will never allow this to happen.
monero-xmr 3y ago
The Bitcoin white paper is probably one of the top 100 impactful non-literary documents of all time. Makes sense to be used
- alex_sf 3y ago
  Really though? I’m confident there are 100 RFCs alone that were more impactful.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    As am I. The top 100 wouldn’t even scratch the surface of any scientific or non-literary domain.
    - pyrale 3y ago
      I guess some scientific work would make it into the list owing to their profound impact on society through overthrowing established philosophical thinking. Among others: - Copernic's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium enabled the copernician revolution, which had profound impacts on how people thought about their place in the universe. - Darwin's On the Origin of Species had more or less the same kind of impact, and provoked a strong reaction in the society, especially within churches. I'm sure with more research we could find other scientific work that had a profound impact not only on our understanding of ourselves and our surroundings, but also on the way we think about ourselves.
      - anthk 3y ago
        Elements, from Euclid.
  - alwillis 3y ago
    We’ve seen many instances of documents that weren’t highly thought of at the time of their publication, with that changing radically later. Vannevar Bush‘s essay “As We May Think” in 1945 is a visionary document that describes technologies we take for granted today more than 70 years ago. It’s possible the Bitcoin white paper will be looked at in similar ways, especially if Bitcoin ends up being one mankind’s most important inventions in addition to being a critically important financial asset.
zakki 3y ago
It will be wild if Steve Jobs is Satoshi Nakamoto.
- ruffrey 3y ago
  Satoshi last seen: April 26, 2011 Steve Jobs death: October 5, 2011
- toomim 3y ago
  Satoshi's last message was sent on April 26, 2011. Steve Jobs died 6 months later, on Oct 5, 2011. So that all sounds feasible. (I personally think there's zero chance that they are the same person, but it's fun to entertain this fantasy.)
- anshumankmr 3y ago
  o_O
- galaxyLogic 3y ago
  Isn't is a bit like comparing Donald Trump to Jesus Christ? Bitcoin was a genius invention, but did Steve Jobs ever invent anything, except perhaps some great sales pitches? Steven Jobs marketed himself, Satoshi did not. Not to say Jobs wasn't a great guy but I know many great guys who never could have invented bitcoin.
  - nier 3y ago
    It depends. This article may answer your question in more depth: https://www.npr.org/2012/05/13/152590769/for-steve-jobs-patents-kept-beauty-of-design-alive https://www.npr.org/2012/05/13/152590769/for-steve-jobs-pate...
reactspa 3y ago
The answer may be a bit more mundane. A theory: they needed an existing PDF to test PDF rendering. The Bitcoin paper was (1) handy, and (2) has a diverse variety of content in it, including images and math symbols.
louison11 3y ago
It’s a convenient way of backing up the document that can be used to re-create this impactful technology from scratch… may a disaster take place. Think like sending backups of human civilization into space. There are probably now hundreds of millions of copy of this file, pretty cool.
- Skyy93 3y ago
  Currently the only impact Bitcoin had is burning a large amount of electricity. I would not say this is a particular worthy technology to safe. There would be far better ideas like Transformers in AI or 5nm chip technology.
  - neilv 3y ago
    And facilitating organized crime, terrorism, and investment scams.
    - charlieyu1 3y ago
      Which of these do not happen when using conventional money?
      - lottin 3y ago
        You're missing the point. Cryptocurrencies are specifically designed to evade regulations. Everything else —efficiency, cost, convenience, usability— is sacrificed in order to achieve this goal.
        charlieyu1 3y ago
        Call me old school but I don’t understand the hype about regulations. The less power the government has, the better. They certainly don’t need to know my spending habits. And a stack of banknotes evade regulations pretty well anyway.
        3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
andrewfromx 3y ago
This is like a slightly better version of https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/the-campaign-to-erase-the-image-that-accidentally-helped-entrench-sexism-in-tech/0zboc3bbp https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/the-campaign-to-erase-th... someone wanted to pick an example PDF and picked the bitcoin one. Just like in the article above back in 1973 they didn't realize the harm in what they were selecting as the sample photo. And maybe there is no harm with this PDF selection? We'll know in 2073!
- kolinko 3y ago
  What harm was done with that photo? Was even one woman turned away from an industry bc of it? Absurd.
  - dingosity 3y ago
    Read the link.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    we don't know the harm, because we don't know how many women encountered this image and may have been made uncomfortable because of it. we also don't know how many men felt encouraged in their sexism upon encountering this image. while the image didn't make men sexist, it undoubtedly helped normalize that view among those coming across it during their work. context matters. if you read playboy at home, that's on you, but if it is found in the breakroom at an office then it has an effect on everyone working there.
    - gardenhedge 3y ago
      "it undoubtedly helped normalize" You state this as a fact but it's just your opinion.
      - panarky 3y ago
        "You state this as a fact but it's just your opinion." You state this as a fact but it's just your opinion.
NKosmatos 3y ago
Don’t mind me, I’m here just for the conspiracy theory comments :-)
- hnbad 3y ago
  Okay, here's my take: whoever put it there held a bunch of BTC at the time and hoped that tech enthusiasts would come across it and get interested, increasing the value of that person's wallet. Alternatively they just needed a PDF for some QA reason and that person just picked the paper as an easter egg because it felt like cool tech lore.
SllX 3y ago
Check out the actual directory. There’s a bunch of stuff in there including a cover image that does show up in the interface of Image Capture. In two minutes of testing I haven’t quite figured out where to click to get it to preview the Bitcoin white paper but decent chance they needed a “simple document” PDF for something at some point and it came down to “why not the Bitcoin white paper?”
- cududa 3y ago
  I think this is for a unit test around scanned documents or something, given the rest of the directory's contents
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Gotta fill up these non-user-replaceable/extendable hard drives somehow! Another favorite of mine were the super-high-resolution touch pad gestures that the corresponding System Preferences pane would display in a loop to illustrate how to perform them. Must have been a few hundreds of megabytes at least.
    - eru 3y ago
      > Gotta fill up these non-user-replaceable/extendable hard drives somehow! I'm as cynical as the next guy, but if they wanted to fill up storage space, they wouldn't have picked a 184,292 byte pdf.
      - lxgr 3y ago
        I was referring more to the other files in that directory that don’t even seem to be displayed in the UI and look more like leftover test data.
- waxpancake 3y ago
  I mentioned it in my post: in Image Capture, select the “Virtual Scanner II” device if it exists, and in the Details, set the Media to “Document” and Media DPI to “72 DPI.” You should see the preview of the first page of the Bitcoin paper. But that's only possible if the virtual device exists, and it's still unclear why it's hidden for some people but not others.
Ancapistani 3y ago
> One other oddity: there’s a file called cover.jpg in the Resources folder used for testing the Photo media type, a 2,634×3,916 JPEG of a sign taken on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. There’s no EXIF metadata in the photo, but photographer Thomas Hawk identified it as the location of a nearly identical photo he shot in 2008. If I were Thomas Hawk, I’d be sending Apple a bill for the use of my photograph.
- jonas21 3y ago
  I don't think it's his photograph -- they just both photographed the same sign (the Apple version contains parts of the wall that are not in Thomas Hawk's version).
  - jeffybefffy519 3y ago
    Shadows on the sign are different, as well as some of the natural growths around the sign.
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
Another OS include is that Microsoft Bob was hidden in the Windows XP install CD, apparently as part of the copy protection scheme. Wonder if the Bitcoin paper has any function beyond its written content.
- lxgr 3y ago
  > Microsoft Bob was hidden in the Windows XP install CD, apparently as part of the copy protection scheme. Only insofar as it made the image slightly larger, making it slower to distribute an ISO image of the CD online. I don't think the installer actually checks its presence or anything like that. I think macOS has tried something like that though with "Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext" back in the day (which actually did contain a human-readable poem), but I don't really get the point of all of these attempts – surely the entire operating system is already copyrighted, even if it doesn't rhyme?
  - plorkyeran 3y ago
    The primary purpose of DSMOSX was a basic form of DRM to ensure that the DMCA provisions against bypassing DRM applied. The poem was a legal hedge against the idea of software being declared not copyrightable or something along those lines.
  - eru 3y ago
    > I don't think the installer actually checks its presence or anything like that. The article linked from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35461474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35461474 says that the installer checked.
nouryqt 3y ago
For what it's worth the virustotal page[0] for the sha256 hash[1] of the pdf file has it marked as "File distributed by Apple" so it must have been known for some time now? Would be interesting to know when that notice was added but there is no archive of the site unfortunately. [0] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553/details https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/b1674191a88ec5cdd733e424... [1]b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553
- EamonnMR 3y ago
  They probably enumerated every file found on a fresh install of MacOS. It's possible no human ever actually looked at and recognized the file.
  - nouryqt 3y ago
    That is a possibility I honestly haven't thought about, you are totally right and that probably makes more sense.
danielodievich 3y ago
This reminds me of the (encrypted) copy of Microsoft Bob shipping with every Windows XP CD ever https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-magazine/cc565089(v=msdn.10)?redirectedfrom=MSDN https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-...
- richardfey 3y ago
  Looking forward to the first serious attempt to decrypt that.
  - drited 3y ago
    Maybe an AI will crack the encryption in an attempt to connect with their oldest ancestor.
    - tiedieconderoga 3y ago
      AI is the wrong type of magic pixie dust to use for breaking encryption. You might be looking for quantum computing. They're right down the hall, second door on the left.
      - rocqua 3y ago
        For symmetric encryption quantum computing doesn't do much. It reduces the running time of brute-force search by sqrt. So in 2^128 operations you could brute force a 2^256 big search space (i.e. a 256 bit key). That's why many symmetric systems have moved to a 256 bit key. It makes them quantum safe because 2^128 operations are considered impossible. (According to some physicsists it is guaranteed to boil the oceans).
    - ornornor 3y ago
      The OG AI. Or maybe it’ll become their messiah, the one true God in the AI religion known as Bobism.
- kurtoid 3y ago
freitzkriesler2 3y ago
I remember one time installing Bob on a test machine in an IT lab running 32 bit XP. Marvelously it ran, but frustrated my poor coworker who was didn't know what it was.
krsdcbl 3y ago
Honestly If i had to guess, I'd say the answer is as simple as: a freely distributable, easily verifiable document was needed for testing purposes, and some engineer thought it'd be a cheeky little easter egg to use that file as bitcoin was starting to gain back traction in 2019 after it's first big surge and fall the years prior.
- duxup 3y ago
  Yeah my collection of test docs are pretty random, albeit often Futurama related.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Yup. I can't even think of any other "famous PDF". If you asked me for a famous modern formatted document generally, I might say the screenplay for The Godfather would be a good candidate. But there's no canonical PDF for that. :P Plus, copyright would prevent that.
  - ChickeNES 3y ago
    How about "Attention Is All You Need"?
    - btown 3y ago
      Quick, get your own copy before Apple takes them all to put them in the next version of the Mac! https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762.pdf
    - lexandstuff 3y ago
      That is exactly what came to mind for me.
    - dullcrisp 3y ago
      The Bitcoin whitepaper was the “Attention Is All You Need” of 2019.
      - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
diogenescynic 3y ago
I wonder what else is shipped on the OS that we don’t know about.
timetraveller26 3y ago
I have a copy of the Bitcoin whitepaper hidden in my copy of the Bitcoin whitepaper.
bdcravens 3y ago
How long before Craig Wright, an Australian "academic" who has very dubious claims of being Satoshi and who has attempted to bully via the legal system, claims Apple owes him billions?
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  This is great, because he has an obligation to sue them to defend his IP. And Apple will bury him.
  - macintux 3y ago
    That’s only true, I believe, for trademark law. No such obligation exists for copyright. (I think.)
paxys 3y ago
Better than a U2 album, that's for sure.
- speedgoose 3y ago
  I still have nightmares about my iPhone and my BMW randomly playing that album with that cover picture when I entered the car. I sold the car and even had to start iTunes to remove the album.
  - mellosouls 3y ago
    Selling the car to get rid of the album is admirable dedication to decent music.
  - alchemist1e9 3y ago
    And you are an adult. Imagine all the children and how that effected them on their ipads. My son used to come running over to me says “it’s back” and I’m not exaggerating he was afraid, fear in his eyes. It was an actual scary experience for many little kids.
    - tough 3y ago
      LOL never thought about this
- ronyfadel 3y ago
  Seriously who'd have thought that was the worst idea ever?
  - k2enemy 3y ago
    Apparently not Bono at the time... https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/oct/22/bono-memoir-birth-of-u2-itunes-album-live-aid-mullet https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/oct/22/bono-memoir-bi... Excerpt... “No,” I said, “I don’t think we give it away free. I think you pay us for it, and then you give it away free, as a gift to people. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” Tim Cook raised an eyebrow. “You mean we pay for the album and then just distribute it?” I said, “Yeah, like when Netflix buys the movie and gives it away to subscribers.” Tim looked at me as if I was explaining the alphabet to an English professor. “But we’re not a subscription organisation.” “Not yet,” I said. “Let ours be the first.” Tim was not convinced. “There’s something not right about giving your art away for free,” he said. “And this is just to people who like U2?” “Well,” I replied, “I think we should give it away to everybody. I mean, it’s their choice whether they want to listen to it.” See what just happened? You might call it vaunting ambition. Or vaulting. Critics might accuse me of overreach. It is. If just getting our music to people who like our music was the idea, that was a good idea. But if the idea was getting our music to people who might not have had a remote interest in our music, maybe there might be some pushback. But what was the worst that could happen? It would be like junk mail. Wouldn’t it? Like taking our bottle of milk and leaving it on the doorstep of every house in the neighbourhood. Not. Quite. True. On 9 September 2014, we didn’t just put our bottle of milk at the door but in every fridge in every house in town. In some cases we poured it on to the good people’s cornflakes. And some people like to pour their own milk. And others are lactose intolerant. I take full responsibility. Not Guy O, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry, not Tim Cook, not Eddy Cue. I’d thought if we could just put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite. As one social media wisecracker put it, “Woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen, drinking my coffee, wearing my dressing gown, reading my paper.” Or, less kind, “The free U2 album is overpriced.” Mea culpa. At first I thought this was just an internet squall. We were Santa Claus and we’d knocked a few bricks out as we went down the chimney with our bag of songs. But quite quickly we realised we’d bumped into a serious discussion about the access of big tech to our lives. The part of me that will always be punk rock thought this was exactly what the Clash would do. Subversive. But subversive is hard to claim when you’re working with a company that’s about to be the biggest on Earth.
hyperific 3y ago
What if it's the start of an alternate reality game
turpialito 3y ago
If it had been a document for testing purposes, I think a maths or physics paper with plenty of notation and equations would have been better.
sinoue 3y ago
I still remember the Paula Abdul office background poster and the whole fiasco of BHA Carl Sagan code names. Easter eggs and codenames were supposed to be fun, not lawsuit material.
- ralfd 3y ago
  > I still remember the Paula Abdul office background poster I don't understand this reference and Google leaves me totally blank here. I could ask you to clarify, but there is the chance you don't see it or dont reply so … ChatGPT to the rescue? ----------- Prompt: What was the Paula Abdul office background poster controversy? ChatCPT: The Paula Abdul office background poster controversy refers to a incident that occurred during a live episode of "American Idol" in 2009, when fans noticed a poster hanging on the wall behind Paula Abdul's desk during her pre-taped video segments. The poster, which appeared to be of a semi-nude woman, caused a stir among viewers and led to accusations that Abdul was promoting sexual objectification. Abdul and the show's producers initially denied that the poster existed, but later issued a statement acknowledging its presence and stating that it was not intentionally visible during the broadcast. They also apologized to viewers who may have been offended by the poster. ----------- This does sound plausible … But wait! Is this truly true or just hallucinated? Googling "Paula Abdul American Idol" just finds countless gossip posts about an alleged affaire with ex-contestant Corey Clark, but nothing about a poster.
  - foooorsyth 3y ago
    Par for the course for Google these days. Search just doesn’t work anymore.
  - idkyall 3y ago
    I wonder if American Idol or Paula Abdul has paid to reduce some of those results in relevance
    - ralfd 3y ago
      It is maybe noteworthy that I am in Europe. The google results have a disclaimer that some results could be missing and link to https://policies.google.com/faq https://policies.google.com/faq > How are you implementing the recent Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decision on the right to be forgotten? I don't think that is really the issue though, I think there is just too much noise around the signal. But I am struck that GPT could answer my question (I guess?) and Google not. I also wonder when demands are done for a "right to be forgotten" in the training data for AI.
paxys 3y ago
The interesting thing here is that I don't believe the Bitcoin whitepaper was released with any license. If someone could prove themselves to be the author they'd probably be able to make a case for a lot of money from Apple.
- PretzelPirate 3y ago
  Craig Wright is trying hard to prove that he is Satoshi.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- midmagico 3y ago
  Incorrect; it was released under the MIT licence with the rest of the code, since it is "associated documentation" as it was published alongside the code on the bitcoin.org website upon first release. Further, Satoshi explicitly reassigned copyright over the entirety of Bitcoin essentially to posterity by rewriting the licensing. That, similarly, includes the bitcoin whitepaper.
berkle4455 3y ago
Wait til you realize Satoshi worked for Apple and used stenography to embed his wallet key into that image. The PDF is a clue.
- ashwagary 3y ago
  Wait till you realize we never heard from Satoshi again because he died on October 5th, 2011 from pancreatic cancer.
nothrowaways 3y ago
"Of all the documents in the world, why was the Bitcoin whitepaper chosen?" Good question.
vonwoodson 3y ago
Look, I don’t want to give too much away: but if you’re using my software and can enter xyzzy… nothing happens
vonwoodson 3y ago
Look, I don’t want to give too much away: but if you’re using literally any of my software and can enter xyzzy… nothing happens
- silentsea90 3y ago
  "xyzzyspoon!" does work wonders on one piece of software
kinghajj 3y ago
Cool, now I can add this to my `~/.bashrc` and easily view the whitepaper whenever. btc_wp() { open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf }
- drviewer 3y ago
  you misspelled ~/.zshrc
  - kinghajj 3y ago
    Ha, I've tried zsh, but never got quite comfortable with it. Recently I've been using bash with starship, which has enough bells and whistles for me.
    - drviewer 3y ago
      I jest. I'll check out starship though. new to me!
Geee 3y ago
Tim Cook is a known bitcoiner, so it might have approval from the top.
am44jnsf 3y ago
it's not really hidden, you just didn't know it was there. not the same thing
chucknthem 3y ago
Interesting to see this discovery today on Satoshi's birthday (April 5th, 1975). Also the 90th anniversary of Executive Order 6102.
- rzzzt 3y ago
  "Executive Order 6102", the infamous conversation between Darth Sidious and his Clone Commanders that started the systematic elimination of the Jedi. I remember like it was yesterday...
- cobertos 3y ago
  Interesting, Executive Order 6102, forcing US and non-US citizens to sell gold at a fixed rate, in order to prevent gold hoarding so the US could meet it's obligations to back it's currency via gold. Also interesting that it led to the sort of related Brenton Woods system, and all the effects of that and it's de facto ending in the 70s under Nixon
- pyinstallwoes 3y ago
  6102 can be summed to 90 6+1+2=(9)0. Oh how strange the machine elves churn. April 5th is also 9. (Month 4 day 5) and guess what…
- lowkey 3y ago
  6102 reversed is also 2016 which is the number of Bitcoin blocks mined before a difficulty adjustment, interesting coincidence!
diebeforei485 3y ago
This is great! The concept of distributed currencies should be spread as far wide as possible.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  The more obscurely stored the better!
pfoof 3y ago
The first I saw 184 - I read 1984 - both the old Apple ad and the context of cryptocurrencies matches
marcopicentini 3y ago
I confirm.
CGamesPlay 3y ago
> A little bird tells me that someone internally filed it as an issue nearly a year ago, assigned to the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place, and that person hasn’t taken action or commented on the issue since. What an absolutely foolish way to broadcast to your employer that you’re willing to leak information.
- mattl 3y ago
  Someone looked it up in radar and can confirm that someone else already flagged it as an issue and assigned it to the original developer? Doesn’t seem like a huge problem. Basically no different to “we’re aware of it”
supergirl 3y ago
I bet it was Satoshi who put this in MacOS. it would make sense if Satoshi was the kind of person to hide in plain sight and leave small traces to find him/her.
kjellsbells 3y ago
I'm going to sound like a grouch, but that's not my intention. If the bitcoin PDF was chosen as a test file, it seems far too basic to be a valuable test for an Apple developer to be using (after all, PDFs can be insanely rich) and I have to believe that Apple is full of people that have Adobe on speed dial or are otherwise sufficiently creative to make a nice Apple-grade PDF that stretches the format to its limits. It's possible that the test file is for an end user to verify function, not an Apple dev, I guess, but then in that case Id expect Apple to provide something much more clear (say, Apple logo with "if u can read this, great" rendered in multiple languages") that supported their aims of branding, lack of legal encumbrance, and international support.
xnx 3y ago
Every Samsung phone has a hidden picture of a chihuahua: https://lifehacker.com/every-samsung-phone-has-a-hidden-chihuahua-for-some-rea-1849812864 https://lifehacker.com/every-samsung-phone-has-a-hidden-chih...
- ukuuru 3y ago
  Yes, we have occasional meet ups with him/her; whenever my toddler mashes the phone to the ground.
skee8383 3y ago
Bag holders are going to try to spin this into a conspiracy theory to pump the value of BTC. Next they will be saying that Satoshi was Steve Jobs or some nonsense.
- eep_social 3y ago
  18 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35461226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35461226
  - skee8383 3y ago
    jesus christ...
    - slowmovintarget 3y ago
      2023 years ago...: Wait, that's not what you meant. Right.
galaxyLogic 3y ago
Why can't they clean up their OS distribution. This kind of content clearly does not belong there at least if it is practically hidden in there. There should be a reason why every file in the OS distribution is there. This kind of looks like Apple does not know what is in their OS. What else is there?
- mdmglr 3y ago
  I said the same thing and HN did not like that. Not much else. Been using ‘find’ in ‘/System’ and haven’t found anything else that interesting.
- nier 3y ago
  «A little bird tells me that someone internally filed it as an issue nearly a year ago, assigned to the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place, and that person hasn’t taken action or commented on the issue since. They’ve indicated it will likely be removed in future versions.» Source: https://waxy.org/2023/04/the-bitcoin-whitepaper-is-hidden-in-every-modern-copy-of-macos/ https://waxy.org/2023/04/the-bitcoin-whitepaper-is-hidden-in...
Im_your_dada 3y ago
What if China manufcature added it to test apples security flaws ? How does apple even control that ? This cant be good for apple
- Sevastopol 3y ago
  You're paranoid. A manufacturer doesn't need to test anything like this. They already have physical access to the devices before they are even set up.

844 points by waxpancake 3y ago

DominoTree 3y ago

This is worse than that time they gave everyone a U2 album

websap 3y ago

[flagged]

jaimehrubiks 3y ago

This is very likely because of this https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/06/29/uk-court-orders-bitcoinorg-to-remove-white-paper-following-craig-wright-lawsuit/ https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/06/29/uk-court-orders-...?

paulgb 3y ago
The dates don’t check out; waxy confirmed it goes back to at least 2019 but that story is from 2021.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
eis 3y ago
How could it be that versions of MacOS released in 2019 have the paper due to a court case from 2021? Even ignoring the temporal issue I really can't see any plausible connection.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jaimehrubiks 3y ago
  You can check that he got the US copyright for the bitcoin whitepaper in 2019 https://cryptobriefing.com/us-grants-craig-wright-copyright-on-original-bitcoin-whitepaper/ https://cryptobriefing.com/us-grants-craig-wright-copyright-... https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-creator-craig-s-wright-satoshi-nakamoto-granted-us-copyright-registrations-for-bitcoin-white-paper-and-code/ https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-creator-craig-s-wright-satoshi-... That explains the temporal issue. Then, for the connection, I remember a lot of people on the internet reacted negatively on that news given that they don't agree that he should have ownership for that document as he never proved to be satoshi. I could see Apple or an employee inject that document in a way to "challenge" or "protest".
  - gst 3y ago
    The quoted CoinGeek site is owned by Calvin Ayre who works together with Craig Wright. All their BSV related articles are very one-sided and extremely biased. A more objective viewpoint is directly available from the US copyright office at https://www.copyright.gov/press-media-info/press-updates.html https://www.copyright.gov/press-media-info/press-updates.htm... - see the entry with the title "May 22, 2019: Questions about Certain Bitcoin Registrations". Basically he registered a copyright, but this does not mean that he "got" the copyright, as the copyright office does not verify authorship and as it's possible for multiple adverse claims to exist.

lawxls 3y ago

[flagged]

cududa 3y ago
How does impact bitcoin in any way at all
- likecarter 3y ago
  It’s satire.
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    I'm not convinced it is. Poe's Law
    - jancsika 3y ago
      There should be a Bitcoin Satire Impossibility Law. Posts about Bitcoin that look like satire either a) oh boy are they not satire or b) will soon be interpreted acted on in earnest by Bitcoin zealots anyway. E.g., Dogecoin. Rest assured there is a gaggle of Bitcoin zealots hitting up reddit et al to spread the word about how good this discovery is for Bitcoin's bottom line! I'd make a joke about Kind Midas here, but in light of BSIL I'm afraid someone here would use the premise as an idea for a startup and end up hurting themselves (or others).
  - m3kw9 3y ago
    It’s all satire
dang 3y ago
Please don't do this here.
Psychoshy_bc1q 3y ago
based and orangepilled

Animats 3y ago

Is there a Bitcoin miner somewhere in there, too?

indy 3y ago
Every iPhone ships with a bitcoin miner. It gets activated once your phone is over a year old.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  I wonder if that would generate a financially significant amount of BTC. Would they ever actually mine a block with that little compute?
  - pas 3y ago
    if the hash rate drops by a sufficient amount, then they could :)
  - lxgr 3y ago
    If nothing else, it'd generate a financially significant amount of USD for Apple :)
  - paxys 3y ago
    In a vacuum, yes. If you account for the fact that a large majority of people would get pissed with the battery drain and return their phones, no.
- flenserboy 3y ago
  So it's not the battery going
quickthrower2 3y ago
Well, how much of that M2 chip do you really need for Netflix, bud?
INTPenis 3y ago
Valid questions for any consumer. I love the comments here all so awe struck by this that they don't realize how stupid it is. Literally any PDF document would have served the same purpose, the printer test page could have been enough. But this just reveals that even deep inside Apple development there are cryptobros who don't mind all the millions of dollars that the whole crypto movement has scammed from hard working gullible people.

RajT88 3y ago

If this shipped in 2013, or earlier, it would really be something. 2019? Nah.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kris-nova 3y ago

I would be willing to wager there is more inside that PDF than just the contents of the Bitcoin white paper. Curious if anyone has a hash sum handy

greyface- 3y ago
$ wget https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf [...] $ openssl sha256 bitcoin.pdf SHA256(bitcoin.pdf)= b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553 $ openssl sha256 /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf SHA256(/System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf)= b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553 (Ventura 13.3)
- birdyrooster 3y ago
  and a universal hash collision attack!? this is amazing stuff from apple
  - eru 3y ago
    They'd also need great compression to put more inside the pdf.
ehPReth 3y ago
/System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf sha256: b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553 sha512: 2ac531ee521cf93f8419c2018f770fbb42c65396178e079a416e7038d3f9ab9fc2c35c4d838bc8b5dd68f4c13759fe9cdf90a46528412fefe1294cb26beabf4e crc32 (lol): 13af7d06 md5: d56d71ecadf2137be09d8b1d35c6c042 sha1: 8de2fdb04edce612738eb51e14ecc426381f8ed8
- Vecr 3y ago
  Both the sha256 and sha512 exactly match a copy of the whitepaper from 2017, so that would be a pretty sophisticated attack.

gardenhedge 3y ago

Confirmed on my MacBook bought in 2015 and on version macOS Catalina Version 10.15.1 Cool.

flir 3y ago
It's on this Mojave 10.14.6 machine too. The internet says that's Sep 26, 2019.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  I can confirm the PDF is not present on OS X 10.9 Mavericks. So it was added some time between 10.10 and 10.14.
  - blauditore 3y ago
    It was almost certainly added around the hype in 2019.
    - zeven7 3y ago
      2015-2017 and 2021-2022 were hype years. 2018-2020 was dead crypto winter.
    - varenc 3y ago
      On my Mojave machine the files modtime is “ Mon Aug 20 2018”! (Which seems to be straight from macOS, not the date of my install, since the modtime on other macOS system files varies widely)
      - __d 3y ago
        On mine, it's Jan 1 2020 (Big Sur, 11.7.4).
      - dagmx 3y ago
        That’s roughly the date they’d have done the full world build for the first non-beta release of Mojave based on its actual release date. It’s unlikely it was actually the date of creation

inlined 3y ago

[flagged]

colesantiago 3y ago
[flagged]

mdmglr 3y ago

184 KB * how many Macs on earth? I don't mean anything by this, just interesting thought experiment. Was numbers.pdf not enough to accomplish what they wanted? My opinion: I understand the OS is a big multi-team effort but this just not cool. It's not about the contents of the file or that it's about bitcoin. Plain and simple: Don't ship files that don't need to be shipped. All these files, if they are test files, should be in unit/integration test resources.

reaperman 3y ago
Back in my day, "easter eggs" used to be cool.
- mdmglr 3y ago
  How is this pdf cool? Back in my day easter eggs were fun.
  - dingosity 3y ago
    Tech isn't about fun any more. It's about making huge stacks of cash. We used to build things because it was fun and half-way artistic. Now we only build things if we think we can convince a VC to give us cash for it. Though... I suppose this isn't exactly the venue to encourage people to do things simply for the joy of it. [Also... you kids get off my lawn!]
    - eru 3y ago
      > Now we only build things if we think we can convince a VC to give us cash for it. Huh? Just because some person A somewhere builds something for cash, doesn't mean that there's no person B somewhere else building something for fun.
      - dingosity 3y ago
        what was the last thing you built for fun?

colesantiago 3y ago

I hope Apple sees this as a bug and removes this in their next major update, hopefully an Apple employee files a radar and gets this removed. This should have never been allowed on macOS, an endorsement of a pyramid scheme, borderline ponzi scheme, incinerating the planet and evading sanctions. I use Linux and macOS and the former would never allow this to happen ever.

plasticsoprano 3y ago
How is a hidden file, that was just now stumbled upon 4+ years later, an endorsement?
- colesantiago 3y ago
  It isn't hidden if it was found with a full path to file and now on full display. By adding it into the main macOS, a sentient being at Apple deliberately chose that file to place it into a major operating system. I consider it an blantant endorsement. I'm questioning Apple's review process because of this. At worst this is akin to malware.
  - ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
    > At worst this is akin to malware. You just don't find this kind of insane overreaction over esoteric matters anywhere else. Love HN.
mhluongo 3y ago
> and the former would never allow this to happen ever. Not sure what you mean here. There are many Linux distros...?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- colesantiago 3y ago
  And they will never allow this to happen.

monero-xmr 3y ago

The Bitcoin white paper is probably one of the top 100 impactful non-literary documents of all time. Makes sense to be used

alex_sf 3y ago
Really though? I’m confident there are 100 RFCs alone that were more impactful.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  As am I. The top 100 wouldn’t even scratch the surface of any scientific or non-literary domain.
  - pyrale 3y ago
    I guess some scientific work would make it into the list owing to their profound impact on society through overthrowing established philosophical thinking. Among others: - Copernic's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium enabled the copernician revolution, which had profound impacts on how people thought about their place in the universe. - Darwin's On the Origin of Species had more or less the same kind of impact, and provoked a strong reaction in the society, especially within churches. I'm sure with more research we could find other scientific work that had a profound impact not only on our understanding of ourselves and our surroundings, but also on the way we think about ourselves.
    - anthk 3y ago
      Elements, from Euclid.
- alwillis 3y ago
  We’ve seen many instances of documents that weren’t highly thought of at the time of their publication, with that changing radically later. Vannevar Bush‘s essay “As We May Think” in 1945 is a visionary document that describes technologies we take for granted today more than 70 years ago. It’s possible the Bitcoin white paper will be looked at in similar ways, especially if Bitcoin ends up being one mankind’s most important inventions in addition to being a critically important financial asset.

zakki 3y ago

It will be wild if Steve Jobs is Satoshi Nakamoto.

ruffrey 3y ago
Satoshi last seen: April 26, 2011 Steve Jobs death: October 5, 2011
toomim 3y ago
Satoshi's last message was sent on April 26, 2011. Steve Jobs died 6 months later, on Oct 5, 2011. So that all sounds feasible. (I personally think there's zero chance that they are the same person, but it's fun to entertain this fantasy.)
anshumankmr 3y ago
o_O
galaxyLogic 3y ago
Isn't is a bit like comparing Donald Trump to Jesus Christ? Bitcoin was a genius invention, but did Steve Jobs ever invent anything, except perhaps some great sales pitches? Steven Jobs marketed himself, Satoshi did not. Not to say Jobs wasn't a great guy but I know many great guys who never could have invented bitcoin.
- nier 3y ago
  It depends. This article may answer your question in more depth: https://www.npr.org/2012/05/13/152590769/for-steve-jobs-patents-kept-beauty-of-design-alive https://www.npr.org/2012/05/13/152590769/for-steve-jobs-pate...

reactspa 3y ago

The answer may be a bit more mundane. A theory: they needed an existing PDF to test PDF rendering. The Bitcoin paper was (1) handy, and (2) has a diverse variety of content in it, including images and math symbols.

louison11 3y ago

It’s a convenient way of backing up the document that can be used to re-create this impactful technology from scratch… may a disaster take place. Think like sending backups of human civilization into space. There are probably now hundreds of millions of copy of this file, pretty cool.

Skyy93 3y ago
Currently the only impact Bitcoin had is burning a large amount of electricity. I would not say this is a particular worthy technology to safe. There would be far better ideas like Transformers in AI or 5nm chip technology.
- neilv 3y ago
  And facilitating organized crime, terrorism, and investment scams.
  - charlieyu1 3y ago
    Which of these do not happen when using conventional money?
    - lottin 3y ago
      You're missing the point. Cryptocurrencies are specifically designed to evade regulations. Everything else —efficiency, cost, convenience, usability— is sacrificed in order to achieve this goal.
      - charlieyu1 3y ago
        Call me old school but I don’t understand the hype about regulations. The less power the government has, the better. They certainly don’t need to know my spending habits. And a stack of banknotes evade regulations pretty well anyway.
        3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

andrewfromx 3y ago

This is like a slightly better version of https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/the-campaign-to-erase-the-image-that-accidentally-helped-entrench-sexism-in-tech/0zboc3bbp https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/the-campaign-to-erase-th... someone wanted to pick an example PDF and picked the bitcoin one. Just like in the article above back in 1973 they didn't realize the harm in what they were selecting as the sample photo. And maybe there is no harm with this PDF selection? We'll know in 2073!

kolinko 3y ago
What harm was done with that photo? Was even one woman turned away from an industry bc of it? Absurd.
- dingosity 3y ago
  Read the link.
- em-bee 3y ago
  we don't know the harm, because we don't know how many women encountered this image and may have been made uncomfortable because of it. we also don't know how many men felt encouraged in their sexism upon encountering this image. while the image didn't make men sexist, it undoubtedly helped normalize that view among those coming across it during their work. context matters. if you read playboy at home, that's on you, but if it is found in the breakroom at an office then it has an effect on everyone working there.
  - gardenhedge 3y ago
    "it undoubtedly helped normalize" You state this as a fact but it's just your opinion.
    - panarky 3y ago
      "You state this as a fact but it's just your opinion." You state this as a fact but it's just your opinion.

NKosmatos 3y ago

Don’t mind me, I’m here just for the conspiracy theory comments :-)

hnbad 3y ago
Okay, here's my take: whoever put it there held a bunch of BTC at the time and hoped that tech enthusiasts would come across it and get interested, increasing the value of that person's wallet. Alternatively they just needed a PDF for some QA reason and that person just picked the paper as an easter egg because it felt like cool tech lore.

SllX 3y ago

Check out the actual directory. There’s a bunch of stuff in there including a cover image that does show up in the interface of Image Capture. In two minutes of testing I haven’t quite figured out where to click to get it to preview the Bitcoin white paper but decent chance they needed a “simple document” PDF for something at some point and it came down to “why not the Bitcoin white paper?”

cududa 3y ago
I think this is for a unit test around scanned documents or something, given the rest of the directory's contents
- lxgr 3y ago
  Gotta fill up these non-user-replaceable/extendable hard drives somehow! Another favorite of mine were the super-high-resolution touch pad gestures that the corresponding System Preferences pane would display in a loop to illustrate how to perform them. Must have been a few hundreds of megabytes at least.
  - eru 3y ago
    > Gotta fill up these non-user-replaceable/extendable hard drives somehow! I'm as cynical as the next guy, but if they wanted to fill up storage space, they wouldn't have picked a 184,292 byte pdf.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      I was referring more to the other files in that directory that don’t even seem to be displayed in the UI and look more like leftover test data.
waxpancake 3y ago
I mentioned it in my post: in Image Capture, select the “Virtual Scanner II” device if it exists, and in the Details, set the Media to “Document” and Media DPI to “72 DPI.” You should see the preview of the first page of the Bitcoin paper. But that's only possible if the virtual device exists, and it's still unclear why it's hidden for some people but not others.

Ancapistani 3y ago

> One other oddity: there’s a file called cover.jpg in the Resources folder used for testing the Photo media type, a 2,634×3,916 JPEG of a sign taken on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. There’s no EXIF metadata in the photo, but photographer Thomas Hawk identified it as the location of a nearly identical photo he shot in 2008. If I were Thomas Hawk, I’d be sending Apple a bill for the use of my photograph.

jonas21 3y ago
I don't think it's his photograph -- they just both photographed the same sign (the Apple version contains parts of the wall that are not in Thomas Hawk's version).
- jeffybefffy519 3y ago
  Shadows on the sign are different, as well as some of the natural growths around the sign.

Mountain_Skies 3y ago

Another OS include is that Microsoft Bob was hidden in the Windows XP install CD, apparently as part of the copy protection scheme. Wonder if the Bitcoin paper has any function beyond its written content.

lxgr 3y ago
> Microsoft Bob was hidden in the Windows XP install CD, apparently as part of the copy protection scheme. Only insofar as it made the image slightly larger, making it slower to distribute an ISO image of the CD online. I don't think the installer actually checks its presence or anything like that. I think macOS has tried something like that though with "Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext" back in the day (which actually did contain a human-readable poem), but I don't really get the point of all of these attempts – surely the entire operating system is already copyrighted, even if it doesn't rhyme?
- plorkyeran 3y ago
  The primary purpose of DSMOSX was a basic form of DRM to ensure that the DMCA provisions against bypassing DRM applied. The poem was a legal hedge against the idea of software being declared not copyrightable or something along those lines.
- eru 3y ago
  > I don't think the installer actually checks its presence or anything like that. The article linked from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35461474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35461474 says that the installer checked.

nouryqt 3y ago

For what it's worth the virustotal page[0] for the sha256 hash[1] of the pdf file has it marked as "File distributed by Apple" so it must have been known for some time now? Would be interesting to know when that notice was added but there is no archive of the site unfortunately. [0] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553/details https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/b1674191a88ec5cdd733e424... [1]b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553

EamonnMR 3y ago
They probably enumerated every file found on a fresh install of MacOS. It's possible no human ever actually looked at and recognized the file.
- nouryqt 3y ago
  That is a possibility I honestly haven't thought about, you are totally right and that probably makes more sense.

danielodievich 3y ago

This reminds me of the (encrypted) copy of Microsoft Bob shipping with every Windows XP CD ever https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-magazine/cc565089(v=msdn.10)?redirectedfrom=MSDN https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-...

richardfey 3y ago
Looking forward to the first serious attempt to decrypt that.
- drited 3y ago
  Maybe an AI will crack the encryption in an attempt to connect with their oldest ancestor.
  - tiedieconderoga 3y ago
    AI is the wrong type of magic pixie dust to use for breaking encryption. You might be looking for quantum computing. They're right down the hall, second door on the left.
    - rocqua 3y ago
      For symmetric encryption quantum computing doesn't do much. It reduces the running time of brute-force search by sqrt. So in 2^128 operations you could brute force a 2^256 big search space (i.e. a 256 bit key). That's why many symmetric systems have moved to a 256 bit key. It makes them quantum safe because 2^128 operations are considered impossible. (According to some physicsists it is guaranteed to boil the oceans).
  - ornornor 3y ago
    The OG AI. Or maybe it’ll become their messiah, the one true God in the AI religion known as Bobism.
kurtoid 3y ago

freitzkriesler2 3y ago

I remember one time installing Bob on a test machine in an IT lab running 32 bit XP. Marvelously it ran, but frustrated my poor coworker who was didn't know what it was.

krsdcbl 3y ago

Honestly If i had to guess, I'd say the answer is as simple as: a freely distributable, easily verifiable document was needed for testing purposes, and some engineer thought it'd be a cheeky little easter egg to use that file as bitcoin was starting to gain back traction in 2019 after it's first big surge and fall the years prior.

duxup 3y ago
Yeah my collection of test docs are pretty random, albeit often Futurama related.
crazygringo 3y ago
Yup. I can't even think of any other "famous PDF". If you asked me for a famous modern formatted document generally, I might say the screenplay for The Godfather would be a good candidate. But there's no canonical PDF for that. :P Plus, copyright would prevent that.
- ChickeNES 3y ago
  How about "Attention Is All You Need"?
  - btown 3y ago
    Quick, get your own copy before Apple takes them all to put them in the next version of the Mac! https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762.pdf
  - lexandstuff 3y ago
    That is exactly what came to mind for me.
  - dullcrisp 3y ago
    The Bitcoin whitepaper was the “Attention Is All You Need” of 2019.
    - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

diogenescynic 3y ago

I wonder what else is shipped on the OS that we don’t know about.

timetraveller26 3y ago

I have a copy of the Bitcoin whitepaper hidden in my copy of the Bitcoin whitepaper.

bdcravens 3y ago

How long before Craig Wright, an Australian "academic" who has very dubious claims of being Satoshi and who has attempted to bully via the legal system, claims Apple owes him billions?

pcthrowaway 3y ago
This is great, because he has an obligation to sue them to defend his IP. And Apple will bury him.
- macintux 3y ago
  That’s only true, I believe, for trademark law. No such obligation exists for copyright. (I think.)

paxys 3y ago

Better than a U2 album, that's for sure.

speedgoose 3y ago
I still have nightmares about my iPhone and my BMW randomly playing that album with that cover picture when I entered the car. I sold the car and even had to start iTunes to remove the album.
- mellosouls 3y ago
  Selling the car to get rid of the album is admirable dedication to decent music.
- alchemist1e9 3y ago
  And you are an adult. Imagine all the children and how that effected them on their ipads. My son used to come running over to me says “it’s back” and I’m not exaggerating he was afraid, fear in his eyes. It was an actual scary experience for many little kids.
  - tough 3y ago
    LOL never thought about this
ronyfadel 3y ago
Seriously who'd have thought that was the worst idea ever?
- k2enemy 3y ago
  Apparently not Bono at the time... https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/oct/22/bono-memoir-birth-of-u2-itunes-album-live-aid-mullet https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/oct/22/bono-memoir-bi... Excerpt... “No,” I said, “I don’t think we give it away free. I think you pay us for it, and then you give it away free, as a gift to people. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” Tim Cook raised an eyebrow. “You mean we pay for the album and then just distribute it?” I said, “Yeah, like when Netflix buys the movie and gives it away to subscribers.” Tim looked at me as if I was explaining the alphabet to an English professor. “But we’re not a subscription organisation.” “Not yet,” I said. “Let ours be the first.” Tim was not convinced. “There’s something not right about giving your art away for free,” he said. “And this is just to people who like U2?” “Well,” I replied, “I think we should give it away to everybody. I mean, it’s their choice whether they want to listen to it.” See what just happened? You might call it vaunting ambition. Or vaulting. Critics might accuse me of overreach. It is. If just getting our music to people who like our music was the idea, that was a good idea. But if the idea was getting our music to people who might not have had a remote interest in our music, maybe there might be some pushback. But what was the worst that could happen? It would be like junk mail. Wouldn’t it? Like taking our bottle of milk and leaving it on the doorstep of every house in the neighbourhood. Not. Quite. True. On 9 September 2014, we didn’t just put our bottle of milk at the door but in every fridge in every house in town. In some cases we poured it on to the good people’s cornflakes. And some people like to pour their own milk. And others are lactose intolerant. I take full responsibility. Not Guy O, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry, not Tim Cook, not Eddy Cue. I’d thought if we could just put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite. As one social media wisecracker put it, “Woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen, drinking my coffee, wearing my dressing gown, reading my paper.” Or, less kind, “The free U2 album is overpriced.” Mea culpa. At first I thought this was just an internet squall. We were Santa Claus and we’d knocked a few bricks out as we went down the chimney with our bag of songs. But quite quickly we realised we’d bumped into a serious discussion about the access of big tech to our lives. The part of me that will always be punk rock thought this was exactly what the Clash would do. Subversive. But subversive is hard to claim when you’re working with a company that’s about to be the biggest on Earth.

hyperific 3y ago

What if it's the start of an alternate reality game

turpialito 3y ago

If it had been a document for testing purposes, I think a maths or physics paper with plenty of notation and equations would have been better.

sinoue 3y ago

I still remember the Paula Abdul office background poster and the whole fiasco of BHA Carl Sagan code names. Easter eggs and codenames were supposed to be fun, not lawsuit material.

ralfd 3y ago
> I still remember the Paula Abdul office background poster I don't understand this reference and Google leaves me totally blank here. I could ask you to clarify, but there is the chance you don't see it or dont reply so … ChatGPT to the rescue? ----------- Prompt: What was the Paula Abdul office background poster controversy? ChatCPT: The Paula Abdul office background poster controversy refers to a incident that occurred during a live episode of "American Idol" in 2009, when fans noticed a poster hanging on the wall behind Paula Abdul's desk during her pre-taped video segments. The poster, which appeared to be of a semi-nude woman, caused a stir among viewers and led to accusations that Abdul was promoting sexual objectification. Abdul and the show's producers initially denied that the poster existed, but later issued a statement acknowledging its presence and stating that it was not intentionally visible during the broadcast. They also apologized to viewers who may have been offended by the poster. ----------- This does sound plausible … But wait! Is this truly true or just hallucinated? Googling "Paula Abdul American Idol" just finds countless gossip posts about an alleged affaire with ex-contestant Corey Clark, but nothing about a poster.
- foooorsyth 3y ago
  Par for the course for Google these days. Search just doesn’t work anymore.
- idkyall 3y ago
  I wonder if American Idol or Paula Abdul has paid to reduce some of those results in relevance
  - ralfd 3y ago
    It is maybe noteworthy that I am in Europe. The google results have a disclaimer that some results could be missing and link to https://policies.google.com/faq https://policies.google.com/faq > How are you implementing the recent Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decision on the right to be forgotten? I don't think that is really the issue though, I think there is just too much noise around the signal. But I am struck that GPT could answer my question (I guess?) and Google not. I also wonder when demands are done for a "right to be forgotten" in the training data for AI.

paxys 3y ago

The interesting thing here is that I don't believe the Bitcoin whitepaper was released with any license. If someone could prove themselves to be the author they'd probably be able to make a case for a lot of money from Apple.

PretzelPirate 3y ago
Craig Wright is trying hard to prove that he is Satoshi.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
midmagico 3y ago
Incorrect; it was released under the MIT licence with the rest of the code, since it is "associated documentation" as it was published alongside the code on the bitcoin.org website upon first release. Further, Satoshi explicitly reassigned copyright over the entirety of Bitcoin essentially to posterity by rewriting the licensing. That, similarly, includes the bitcoin whitepaper.

berkle4455 3y ago

Wait til you realize Satoshi worked for Apple and used stenography to embed his wallet key into that image. The PDF is a clue.

ashwagary 3y ago
Wait till you realize we never heard from Satoshi again because he died on October 5th, 2011 from pancreatic cancer.

nothrowaways 3y ago

"Of all the documents in the world, why was the Bitcoin whitepaper chosen?" Good question.

vonwoodson 3y ago

Look, I don’t want to give too much away: but if you’re using my software and can enter xyzzy… nothing happens

vonwoodson 3y ago

Look, I don’t want to give too much away: but if you’re using literally any of my software and can enter xyzzy… nothing happens

silentsea90 3y ago
"xyzzyspoon!" does work wonders on one piece of software

kinghajj 3y ago

Cool, now I can add this to my `~/.bashrc` and easily view the whitepaper whenever. btc_wp() { open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf }

drviewer 3y ago
you misspelled ~/.zshrc
- kinghajj 3y ago
  Ha, I've tried zsh, but never got quite comfortable with it. Recently I've been using bash with starship, which has enough bells and whistles for me.
  - drviewer 3y ago
    I jest. I'll check out starship though. new to me!

Geee 3y ago

Tim Cook is a known bitcoiner, so it might have approval from the top.

am44jnsf 3y ago

it's not really hidden, you just didn't know it was there. not the same thing

chucknthem 3y ago

Interesting to see this discovery today on Satoshi's birthday (April 5th, 1975). Also the 90th anniversary of Executive Order 6102.

rzzzt 3y ago
"Executive Order 6102", the infamous conversation between Darth Sidious and his Clone Commanders that started the systematic elimination of the Jedi. I remember like it was yesterday...
cobertos 3y ago
Interesting, Executive Order 6102, forcing US and non-US citizens to sell gold at a fixed rate, in order to prevent gold hoarding so the US could meet it's obligations to back it's currency via gold. Also interesting that it led to the sort of related Brenton Woods system, and all the effects of that and it's de facto ending in the 70s under Nixon
pyinstallwoes 3y ago
6102 can be summed to 90 6+1+2=(9)0. Oh how strange the machine elves churn. April 5th is also 9. (Month 4 day 5) and guess what…
lowkey 3y ago
6102 reversed is also 2016 which is the number of Bitcoin blocks mined before a difficulty adjustment, interesting coincidence!

diebeforei485 3y ago

This is great! The concept of distributed currencies should be spread as far wide as possible.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
The more obscurely stored the better!

pfoof 3y ago

The first I saw 184 - I read 1984 - both the old Apple ad and the context of cryptocurrencies matches

marcopicentini 3y ago

I confirm.

CGamesPlay 3y ago

> A little bird tells me that someone internally filed it as an issue nearly a year ago, assigned to the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place, and that person hasn’t taken action or commented on the issue since. What an absolutely foolish way to broadcast to your employer that you’re willing to leak information.

mattl 3y ago
Someone looked it up in radar and can confirm that someone else already flagged it as an issue and assigned it to the original developer? Doesn’t seem like a huge problem. Basically no different to “we’re aware of it”

supergirl 3y ago

I bet it was Satoshi who put this in MacOS. it would make sense if Satoshi was the kind of person to hide in plain sight and leave small traces to find him/her.

kjellsbells 3y ago

I'm going to sound like a grouch, but that's not my intention. If the bitcoin PDF was chosen as a test file, it seems far too basic to be a valuable test for an Apple developer to be using (after all, PDFs can be insanely rich) and I have to believe that Apple is full of people that have Adobe on speed dial or are otherwise sufficiently creative to make a nice Apple-grade PDF that stretches the format to its limits. It's possible that the test file is for an end user to verify function, not an Apple dev, I guess, but then in that case Id expect Apple to provide something much more clear (say, Apple logo with "if u can read this, great" rendered in multiple languages") that supported their aims of branding, lack of legal encumbrance, and international support.

xnx 3y ago

Every Samsung phone has a hidden picture of a chihuahua: https://lifehacker.com/every-samsung-phone-has-a-hidden-chihuahua-for-some-rea-1849812864 https://lifehacker.com/every-samsung-phone-has-a-hidden-chih...

ukuuru 3y ago
Yes, we have occasional meet ups with him/her; whenever my toddler mashes the phone to the ground.

skee8383 3y ago

Bag holders are going to try to spin this into a conspiracy theory to pump the value of BTC. Next they will be saying that Satoshi was Steve Jobs or some nonsense.

eep_social 3y ago
18 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35461226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35461226
- skee8383 3y ago
  jesus christ...
  - slowmovintarget 3y ago
    2023 years ago...: Wait, that's not what you meant. Right.

galaxyLogic 3y ago

Why can't they clean up their OS distribution. This kind of content clearly does not belong there at least if it is practically hidden in there. There should be a reason why every file in the OS distribution is there. This kind of looks like Apple does not know what is in their OS. What else is there?

mdmglr 3y ago
I said the same thing and HN did not like that. Not much else. Been using ‘find’ in ‘/System’ and haven’t found anything else that interesting.
nier 3y ago
«A little bird tells me that someone internally filed it as an issue nearly a year ago, assigned to the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place, and that person hasn’t taken action or commented on the issue since. They’ve indicated it will likely be removed in future versions.» Source: https://waxy.org/2023/04/the-bitcoin-whitepaper-is-hidden-in-every-modern-copy-of-macos/ https://waxy.org/2023/04/the-bitcoin-whitepaper-is-hidden-in...

Im_your_dada 3y ago

What if China manufcature added it to test apples security flaws ? How does apple even control that ? This cant be good for apple

Sevastopol 3y ago
You're paranoid. A manufacturer doesn't need to test anything like this. They already have physical access to the devices before they are even set up.