News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

October 31, 2006

geekery

Encrypted Mac OS X binaries and you

Posted Oct. 31, ’06, 7:47 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Geekery

Mac OS X Internals Amit Singh, author of Mac OS X Internals (I swear I’m going to read my copy one of these days), has released another bonus chapter online. This time he’s breaking down all those encrypted binaries that make Mac OS X… well… Mac OS X.

On the greatest hits lists of these binaries is the Dock, Finder, loginwindow, SystemUIServer, mds, ATSServer, translate, and translated. I’m hoping you can figure out most of those. mds is basically Spotlight. ATSServer gives you all those pretty fonts. Finally, translate and translated make up Rosetta, the technology that made the Intel switch possible and so silky smooth (yeah, yeah, I was a skeptic).

The upshot is that Apple is protecting itself from being copied (through reverse engineering) by encrypting these binaries. Also, don’t forget the the encryption kernel extension dsmos gem hidden within its data:

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.

[via Slashdot]


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