Political Crossfire Forums

[DavidXV]

OSx86 Project was shut down earlier today and now this message:

"We're sorry to report that despite our best efforts, the OSx86 Project has been served with a DMCA violation notice. The forum will be unavailable while we evaluate its contents to remove any violations present. We thank you for your patience in this matter."

During the run up to the new IMacs, hacking into developer kits that were designed to test OS X on Intel boards and applying subtle changes and some not so subtle patching on some files has become a sort of a hobby for some and an educational endeavor for others.

The now famous Maxxuss , Apple's nemesis, and other hackers testing and expanding upon these methods may have even been an assistant for Apple in developing some of it's latest code, if some of it is designed to try to keep this OS contained, but I'm only speculating on that of course and have no way to know.


The OSx86 Project site does not condone or encourage pirating copies of software or operating systems and moves quickly to remove links to anything of that sort...

but there has been a great deal of discussion on this forum about various methods for exploring the limitations and managing to get operating systems to operate on home built PC's possibly breaking an Eula if that Eula states that the OS is not to be used on just any ol PC.

The final say on the legality and enforceability of Eula's may or may not be forthcoming in the near future. In the opinion of some it's a little bit murky and to some the only method for the necessary self education on what modern technology has to offer along with it's limitations and boundaries is the exploration of those limits and boundaries... then again maybe some are just hacking for the fun or to have a G5 for half off.

Some early speculation was that the leaks of the OS X developer kits was done intentionally by Apple to get some Linux style community help on Dev but in a funny sort of leaking and watching way rather than just asking for free some free help the way Linux community is known to do. This speculation was quickly to put to rest by the opinion meisters who follow Apple closely but I have not signed on just yet, Open Darwin was the original plan for community style development but did it ever really catch on?

Maybe hacking dev kits up to version 10.4.3 was OK, however now it looks like Maxxuss and friends may have crossed a line and possibly upset someone like Steve Jobs when his or her patches appeared to be designed for 10.4.4 restore disks rather than dev kits. The Maxxuss site is still up (I'm not even sure if it legal for me to post a link) and the forum where discussion of his handiwork abounded isn't.

I was not familiar with exactly what DMCA or a violation of it was, googled and found it is "The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998" signed by Clinton and even found a counter-site www.anti-dmca.org.

http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf

I only read a few pages so I'm no expert yet but it looks like to me, from a non-legal expert point of view, that there may be as many problems for Apple in that doc as there is for hackers. On about page five there begins a list of exceptions and continue onto page six where one of them mentions privacy. #5 Personal privacy (section (1201 (i) states "This exception permits circumvention when the technological measure, or the work it protects, is capable of collecting or disseminating personally identifying information about the on-line activities of a natural person."

Hmmm, interesting coincidence that Apple has been doing just that.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=177101664
I'm no lawyer, I think though that if I was and found myself representing someone in Apple's cross-hairs, I would want to bring that up, can't really tell if it leaves Apple without a leg to stand on in court, it would surely be worth a try.

If iTunes is collecting and disseminating personally identifiable info does it not make the OS, where iTunes resides, that was made by the same company that makes iTunes, hackworthy to expose all it's little secrets and unhide all it's hidden features and code until it is rendered completely and totally dismantled open for all to see and to make any necessary repairs?

I know what you are thinking, that is not what they were doing, they were installing it on PC's, well yeah but then what were they going to do I don't know. I guess you would have to be a hacker to know, surely some planned to keep looking into this thing and finding whatever is inside the thing and what makes it tick and how to make it keep ticking without working for someone other than the end user.