10 ms·
Stolen From Apple
- rangibaby 14y agoOpen /System/Library/Extensions in OSX and you'll find "Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext" :-)
- jordan_clark 14y agoNSHumanReadableCopyright - Good stuff.
- salgernon 14y agoNot sure if this is still present, but the first intel release had this mapped into ever process's address space: $ cat dsmos.c main() { puts(-16 * 4096 + 0x1600); } $ gcc -o dsmos dsmos.c $ ./dsmos Your karma check for today: 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. (C) Apple Computer, Inc.U??VWS?5P From the excellent: http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter7/binaryprotection/ http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter7/binaryprotection/
- lloeki 14y agoThis kext has an unusual file for a bundle: cat "/System/Library/Extensions/Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext/LICENSE"
- jurre 14y agoFor your convenience: cat "/System/Library/Extensions/Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext/LICENSE" Copyright (c) 2006,2009 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. The purpose of this Apple software is to protect Apple copyrighted materials from unauthorized copying and use. You may not copy, modify, reverse engineer, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, transfer or redistribute this software, in whole or in part. If you have obtained a copy of this Apple software and do not have a valid license from Apple to use it, please immediately destroy or delete it from your computer.
- flyinRyan 14y ago> You may not copy, modify, reverse engineer, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, transfer or redistribute this software, in whole or in part. I think you actually can do some of those things legally, right?
- mh- 14y agoyou can actually see that it's being loaded: % kextstat | grep Steal 99 0 0xffffff7f81afc000 0x5000 0x5000 com.apple.Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X (7.0.0) <74 7 4 3 1>
- eksith 14y agoThis is remarkably like the Underhanded C contest. http://underhanded.xcott.com http://underhanded.xcott.com I imagine hardware manufacturers similarly incorporate some form of identifying macros these days. Of course, most people who buy clones wouldn't really care, but at least the publishers of those clones would be wise to avoid bringing too much attention... Unless they're in a country that has very lax copyright enforcement.
- smoyer 14y agoMy father bought a Franklin Ace and we used it for 5-6 years. It was a great computer (better than the Apple IIe) but mainly because I was running CP/M on the Z80 adapter card that came with it. Why use the Apple's 40 character mode when there was the CP/M 80 character mode handy? And CP/M had WordStar! In any case, thanks for reviving some great memories!
- joezydeco 14y agoThis was a common practice back in the days of easily-copyable ROM firmware and boards that were mostly off-the-shelf TTL chips. Companies could copyright the firmware, but not the board design (which is how companies like Franklin and Compaq got to survive). A lot of arcade videogames have similar things, like the ones that were in Robotron:2084 and Sinistar. Popular arcade titles were counterfeited all the time, this was done as a safety measure if it ever came down to a courtroom verification of the code. http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=87198&highlight=easter+egg http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=87198&h...
- JimmaDaRustla 14y agoNot sure what they stole as the site won't load, but maybe they should steal some bandwidth or hosting services...
- publicfig 14y agoIt loaded fine for me after a little while, but not every site can handle sudden and drastic influxes of traffic from places like HN.
- jkimmel 14y agoI too had to load the Google cache. Here it is in case the site doesn't come back online soon. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Ffolklore.org%2FStoryView.py%3Fproject%3DMacintosh%26story%3DStolen_From_Apple.txt&aq=f&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Ffolklore.org%2FStoryView.py%3Fproject%3DMacintosh%26story%3DStolen_From_Apple.txt&aqs=chrome.0.57j58j60l2.3436j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
- JimmaDaRustla 14y agoThanks, just what I was looking for!
- cooldeal 14y agoSince page is not loading, full text: In 1980, a company called Franklin Computer produced a clone of the Apple II called the Franklin Ace, designed to run the same software. They copied almost every detail of the Apple II, including all of its ROM based software and all the documentation, and sold it at a lower price than Apple. We even found a place in the manual where they forgot to change "Apple" to "Ace". Apple was infuriated, and sued Franklin. They eventually won, and forced Franklin to withdraw the Ace from the market. Even though Apple won the case, it was pretty scary for a while, and it wasn't clear until the end that the judge would rule in Apple's favor - Franklin argued that they had a right to copy the Apple II ROMs, since it was just a "functional mechanism" necessary for software compatibility. We anticipated that someone might try a similar trick with the Macintosh someday. If they were clever enough (which Franklin wasn't), they could disguise the code (say by systematically permuting some registers) so it wouldn't look that similar at the binary level. We thought that we better take some precautions. Steve decided that if a company copied the Mac ROM into their computer, he would like to be able to do a demo during the trial, where he could type a few keystokes into an unmodified infringing machine, and have a large "Stolen From Apple" icon appear on its screen. The routines and data to accomplish that would have to be incorporated into our ROM in a stealthy fashion, so the cloners wouldn't know how to find or remove it. It was tricky enough to be a fun project. Susan designed a nice "Stolen from Apple" icon, featuring prison bars. Steve Capps had recently come up with a simple scheme for compressing ROM-based icons to save space, so we compressed the icon using his technique, which not only reduced the overhead but also made it much harder to detect the icon. Finally, we wrote a tiny routine to decompress the icon, scale it up and display it on the screen. We hid it in the middle of some data tables, so it would be hard to spot when disassembling the ROM. All you had to do to invoke it is enter the debugger and type a 6 digit hexadecimal address followed by a "G", which meant execute the routine at that address. We demoed it for Steve and he liked it. We were kind of hoping someone would copy the ROM just so we could show off our foresight. As far as I know, no one ever did copy the ROM in a commercial project, so it wasn't really necessary, but it did create some intrigue for a while. We let it slip that there was a "stolen from Apple" icon hidden in there somewhere, partially to deter people from copying the ROM. At least one hacker became moderately obsessed with trying to find it. Steve Jasik was the author of the MacNosy disassembler/debugger, which could be used to create pseudo-source for the ROM. He found out about the "stolen from Apple" icon pretty early on, and became determined to isolate it. He lived in Palo Alto, so I would occasionally bump into him, and he would ask me for hints or tell me his latest theory about how it was concealed, which was invariably wrong. This went on for two or three years, before he finally cracked it: I ran into him and he had it nailed, telling me about the compressed icon and the address of the display routine. I congratulated him, but was never sure if he figured it out himself or if someone with access to the source code told him.
- nemo1618 14y agoah, folklore.org. Great site, I think I must have read every story on there by now. You don't have to be an apple fan to enjoy them either.
- jeremyjh 14y agoI wasted an entire day at work there a few years ago.
- JVIDEL 14y agoThere were similar techniques for pirated games. Konami for example saw that pirates usually erased their logo from the boot sequence so what they did is insert some code that detected when this happened and modified the game accordingly. One case was the TMNT game for the NES which when pirated set itself in a ultra-hard mode that was impossible to beat since the final boss keep replenishing its energy.
- ANTSANTS 14y agoThe most evil anti-piracy measure in any game: http://earthboundcentral.com/2011/05/earthbounds-copy-protection/ http://earthboundcentral.com/2011/05/earthbounds-copy-protec... The article claims that it would only happen to experienced ROM hackers, but I could easily see some lazy bootleggers only fixing the first copy protection check without completely testing the game and selling the half-broken result to some hapless kid.
- packetbeats 14y agoMicrosoft did something similar in BASIC, and for the same reason: http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43 http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43 The link contains the asm code and explains the obfuscation.
- Create 14y agohttp://www.nycresistor.com/2012/08/21/ghosts-in-the-rom/ http://www.nycresistor.com/2012/08/21/ghosts-in-the-rom/
- kunai 14y agoThe only thing I really "got" from this article was that there are way too many Steves at Apple.
- NewAccnt 14y agoThey should make an iSteve app.
- gpcz 14y agoThis type of thing was also commonly done in hardware back in the day. For example, DEC VAX microprocessors sometimes had etchings that taunted Soviets reverse-engineering their technology (src: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html ).
- kabdib 14y agoAtari (old Atari, pre-layoff days) had an 8 byte sequence that they copyrighted, and that we were supposed to embed in our games. The idea was you could find the sequence in a pirated ROM and ask in court, "What does this do?" Since the bytes weren't executable code, or useful data, it'd be hard to support their presence in any technical way.
- lloeki 14y agoI heard a story from the days of the Game Boy Advance, which supposedly had a similar feature. Physically, custom carts could easily be made. To prevent this (from a purely legal standpoint) Nintendo made it so the GBA internal ROM was looking for specific data (validated by hash of sorts) on the cart, or it would reject it and refuse to boot. This data happened to be the (copyrighted) logo displayed on boot, hence it made unapproved carts either unbootable or illegal.
- derekp7 14y agoReminds me of how, back in the day, software would look for the letters "IBM" at a specific ROM address (it was in their copyright message) in order to identify the video card as a VGA card (or maybe it was back in the EGA days, can't remember). One of the clever clone card manufactures put in the ROM "There are various pieces of software that expect the letters IBM to appear here".
- tankbot 14y agoOr how a game would make you answer a question that you would only know know if you had the manual to accompany the game. "What is the fourth word from the second paragraph on page 13?" Presumably you didn't have access to a copy machine if you were stealing software back then...
- gmac 14y agoIIRC some games came with a data booklet printed in black on very dark brown, or similar, to foil potential photocopying.
- meseznik 14y agoMacintosh SE Easter Eggs (via EEVblog): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6OTAG1Ersw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6OTAG1Ersw
- mathattack 14y agoI enjoy stories like this that capture the mindset of the era. It was a different time, and very close to the iron.
- losethos 14y agoreverse engineering -- hacking -- is for niggers. Jews do fucked-up shit. Jews have a knack for coming-up with new professions and ways of making money -- pushing the limits from productive work into bullshit and counter-bullshit. God says... honour receiving sparks into Midnight - tcosa10a sublimely sakes contained better Darkness savage disappear chant rose multiplied Employee measuring profound fatness primary Percival affirming Already shops strengthenest herself lovingly indite Apostle welcome tediousness seeth no_you_cant Place judging dutiful head believe defended profounder dwelleth wanton