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 [...]

Read about how to enable trusted computing on Mac OS X. The document’s coverage includes:

A discussion of the TPM hardware present in certain Macintosh computers
Release of an open source TPM driver for Mac OS X
Release of a Mac OS X port of an open source trusted computing software stack
An overview of using the driver and [...]

The very first chapter I wrote for Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach was the “history” chapter. My goal was to create a comprehensive and detailed book. I deemed it important for the reader to understand the long and eventful journey toward Mac OS X. Therefore, I wrote the chapter as a technical history [...]

Mac OS X Internals: A Presentation is a Flash rendition of a presentation I recently gave.

EFI Programming on Mac OS X is a note on jumpstarting EFI development on Mac OS X. Prebuilt compiler toolchains for the PowerPC and x86 versions of Mac OS X are also available.

We have developed software (”BAMBIOS”) that allows such legacy booting on the Intel-based Macintoshes. For example, a regular (that is, non-EFI) version of Linux can be readily booted using this software.
A mini presentation on the design of BAMBIOS is available.

This is a rather trivial update, but here are some points of interest:

Knoppix seems very stable overall.
We fixed the pixels-per-row vs bytes-per-row discrepancy in the kernel, so the X Window server has precise information now.
We have tried VMware Workstation and VMware Player. Both work really well.
This is a screenshot of VMware Workstation running a dual-processor [...]

Yes, it works. In fact, it works really, really well (performance-wise).
Please go here for the initial announcement and a customary screenshot of Windows XP running under the Linux version of VMware. The hardware in question is a 17-inch iMac.

I reported a few days ago that we (my friends Mark A. Smith and Benjamin Reed, and myself) had Linux booting on the Intel-based Macintosh. We also released a test-drive mini-distribution that can be trivially booted by anybody interested.
The subject says it all regarding this update. Pictures and some details are available here.
Please use this [...]

I do have strange friends. Take Mark Smith, for example. Mark is essentially a Windows Internals guy — I would call him OS-agnostic at best. In particular, he is certainly not a “Macintosh person”. However, he recently purchased an Intel-based Macintosh because he felt like running Linux (an operating system that he does not normally [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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” [...]

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 [...]