The Spoony Blog

I was reading through the Mac OS X Internals book, and came across this interesting nugget in chapter 7. In OS X 10.4, a kernel extension maps an anti-piracy message into the 256 bytes of virtual address space of every running process at address 0xFFFF1600, which you can see for yourself by compiling and running the following code:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
    printf("%.256s\n", (char *)0xFFFF1600);
    return 0;
}

The output:

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.

Note that this only works in OS X 10.4, not in 10.5. I don’t know if it runs on older versions of OS X. I wonder if this message is also on iPods and iPhones.

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Misc by adam