I usually find the security-related smugness of Mac users rather jarring. What’s often even more jarring is the reasoning behind such smugness. That said, I have to say that the recent furor regarding the so called OSX.Macarena “virus” amounts to, well, bullshit. If anti-virus companies are pretending to “recognize the threat” and therefore attempting to [...]

Without any ado:
The accompanying website (osxbook.com) of my forthcoming book (Mac OS X Internals) is up. Although the site is preliminary at the moment, it has useful information related to the book. In particular, a detailed table of contents is available for browsing.
osxbook.com also has a blog, which will eventually cause this blog to retire. [...]

A quick FYI… it’s done.

My apologies to all who have sent me emails that I couldn’t respond to — I am almost entirely off email for over a month.
I hope to be able to say “done” in a matter of days now, if you know what I’m talking about.
I know the motion sensor software doesn’t work on Mac OS [...]

Given the level of interest generated by the PowerBook motion sensor experiments ([1], [2]), this should be of interest to many: Mark Smith has published a document titled The ThinkPad APS Accelerometer Interface, which discusses the workings of the “Airbag” motion sensor in ThinkPad notebooks.
This should be of particular use to those who are interested [...]

A Tour of the Mac OS X Kernel is a flash conversion — and a minor edit — of a recent talk I gave at the NSA. Although I think the conversion is fine, since it allows the presentation to be “driven” within a web browser, it is far from being a visually faithful conversion. [...]

This is sort of rushed, since I’m traveling starting today, but I want to share a hopefully useful program for monitoring (in near real-time) file system activity on “Tiger”. The program, called “fslogger”, uses the same underlying mechanism as Spotlight to retrieve file system change information from the kernel.
Here is the relevant discussion and the [...]

I’ve just updated HFSDebug for Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”.
I think this is a pretty exciting update, even for something as unexciting as a “debugger”. The following primary changes have happened:

hfsdebug now understands and displays the on-disk raw structures corresponding to HFS Plus extended attributes.
In particular, hfsdebug can process Access Control Lists (ACLs) from scratch, [...]

The result page for the Mac OS X Expert Challenge is live.
Result and Report: The Mac OS X Expert Challenge 2005.1

The challenge encompasses two partially overlapping areas of expertise:

Operating System Internals
Security

My goals for this endeavor are the following:

Probe popular interest in system-level Mac OS X topics. Knowledge of such interest is currently valuable to me as I am creating a book on such topics.
Gauge the inquisitiveness and initiative of the Mac OS X community based [...]

AMS2HID is software that allows you to use a PowerBook with a motion sensor in new ways. You can play games such as Neverball and driving simulators by using the PowerBook itself as an input controller. The motion of the PowerBook in physical space provides input to such games through AMS2HID. You can also use [...]

Now that the cat’s out of the bag, I can point people to something cool we did in our group at IBM Research. What I am referring to was demonstrated at IBM PartnerWorld 2005 a couple of days ago in Las Vegas, calling it a “personal jumper cable” to counter the “Blue Screen of Death” [...]

I recently looked at the motion sensor based disk drive protection feature added to Apple’s PowerBook line. Here is a discussion along with some examples of using the orientation data provided by the sensor.

gbaunix is a rather contrived experiment in which we run an ancient version of the UNIX operating system on a popular hand-held game system using a simulator. Specifically, it is 5th edition UNIX (1974) running on Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance, with SIMH as the core simulator.

Given the nature and scope of the field of Computer Security, it would require one or more books to even briefly touch upon all that is known in the area. A Taste of Computer Security gives you, well, a taste of (a subset of) the subject. The contents are not uniform in their depth or [...]

My original intent with More Power to Firmware was to put up some sample Forth code for doing graphics with mouse input in the Open Firmware implementation that Apple uses. I have included a discussion of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), broadening the document’s scope.
Three complete (though prototypical) examples are included: Towers of Hanoi (textual) [...]