The Forces of Darkness
There’s a firestorm raging through the blogosphere.
It really is diagnostic of which part of the blogosphere you inhabit, whether you think the subject of the firestorm is
- the President’s endorsement of Intelligent Design,
- the Strings 2005 discussion panel’s vote on the Anthropic Principle,
- or Apple’s incorporation of DRM into the MacOSX/Intel Kernel.
According to the folks from OSx86, who’ve been playing around with the Developer Preview Release,
- We’ve discovered that Rosetta uses TCPA/TPM DRM. Some parts of the GUI like ATSServer are still not native to x86 - meaning that Rosetta is required by the GUI, which in turn requires TPM. See the forum topic here.
- After much careful analysis of the files from the new Intel-based Macs, it would appear that SSE3 enabled processors are required to run the GUI. We are still testing this theory, though - nothing has been proven conclusively. Check out this forum thread for evidence and discussion.
Smart people, like Cory Doctorow, are up in arms, but I don’t really understand how this can succeed in the long run1.
The MacOSX Kernel is Open-Source. TPM support is provided by a kernel extension (called TPMACPI.kext
, I gather). Doubtless, when the next version of MacOSX/Darwin is released, this particular kernel extension will not be Open-Source (unlike the ones which allow Darwin to boot on generic hardware. But who cares? The API provided by this kernel extension will be easy enough to figure out, even assuming that Apple does not save you the trouble by documenting it for use by 3rd party developers. And once you know the API, writing a dummy kernel extension to mimic it on generic x86 hardware will be easy. Oh wait … you mean people are already working on that?
Maybe I’ve missed some essential point2, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a drop-in dummy .kext
, installable by end-users, is available by the time Apple starts shipping x86 Macs.
Update:
As is clear from the comments below, it’s probably not that hard, after all, for Apple to cripple the GUI on generic x86 hardware, regardless of whether the Kernel and the core OS continue to run. TPM does allow individual Applications, themselves, to authenticate the hardware. That’s all that’s required to prevent some crucial part of the GUI from running on unapproved hardware configurations. ☹1 To be clear, Doctorow’s complaints are about the evils of TC generally. In that regard, he’s surely correct. I’m talking only about the ability to boot MacOSX on generic Intel hardware.
2 A DMCA lawsuit by Apple would be one possibility I’ve neglected.
Re: The Forces of Darkness
I don’t know anything about the technical details but doesn’t DRM hardware come with secret keys on chip? In that case, any non open but essential software could check if the other side of the api knows about some private key. And that bit you cannot reverse engineer or fake.