Apple's Poem to Hackers

corkurk

Have you all seen this yet?



http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/ptech/0....ap/index.html



There is apparently a hidden poem in OSX with a message to hackers trying to get OSX to run on standard Intel hardware.



While I think it's pretty clever of Apple, it also makes me wonder if the hacker community will see this as a type of "challenge" and work even harder to get OSX up and running on genereic X86 boxes.



Anybody know where Apple hid this? I'm curious what the thinking was behind the location of this file.



Comments?

xool

My guess was that this was used as a copy protection measure. There used to be hidden stuff in Classic Mac roms that could be displayed at boot using certain debugging commands. This way, if a rom was hacked/stolen/cloned it could be demonstrated in court that it was indeed an illicit Apple rom. This poem is probably similar and perhaps is supported by more artistic copyrights which are likely different than those that apply to the actual code.



Also this reminds me of the "Don't steal music" stickers on iPods.



Personally I think the poem could have been better.



One other upside is that this becomes a PR issue. More press w00t and it piques the interest of our PC brethren.

theapplegenius

Each line of the poem was testing different copy protection schemes AFAIK. A few lines were testing the decryption of the TPM chip, a few others were testing the EFI ROM, and so on.