Apple Ups Pressure on OS X Hackers
Almost immediately after Apple began distributing development systems with Mac OS X for Intel processors last year, hackers got to work on making the operating system run atop generic hardware. Now, the company has upped the ante in its battle to stop them.
In order to keep control of where its software can be run and prevent potential piracy, Apple employed security measures that included a TPM, or trust platform module, chip. Without the presence of this, and other hardware only available from Apple, Mac OS X would simply refuse to run.
As with any protection mechanism, however, it was only a matter of time before intuitive technophiles were able to find their way around it. Apple largely sat back and watched the work while it finalized the Mac OS X for Intel release, with rumors claiming the company was patching the holes as hackers found them.
But things changed this week, as Intel-based Macs reached more consumers and the MacBook Pro began to ship.
Apple sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown demand to the OSx86 project, which has been spearheading the efforts to bring Mac OS X to generic Intel hardware. "The forum will be unavailable while we evaluate its contents to remove any violations present," the group's Web site says.
Apple also left a poetic warning to those trying to hack its operating system in the latest 10.4.5 release.
Embedded in a piece of code that gets decrypted by the TPM is a poem that reads: "Your karma check for today: There once 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."
In a statement confirming the poem, Apple said, "Hopefully it, and many other legal warnings, will remind people that they should not steal Mac OS X."
Despite the concern, Apple says it has no plans to implement advanced authentication mechanisms to prevent piracy, such as Windows Product Activation. Mac OS X currently does not even require a license key to install, and the company has said it prefers to trust its users.