First, this project needs funding. See below for details, and go here if you wish to help in any little bit. Thanks so much; all help is greatly appreciated! In the days of yore, “ Haxies ” were small utilities that heavily customized Mac OS X, either through eye candy or productivity tools, under the Unsanity banner. The initial Haxies like Xounds and FruitMenu were designed solely to bring back…
Apple vs? Google and the hidden war for your identity Please read this first I’m really low on money right now. My credit card is maxed out, and I only have extremely little funds in my bank accounts of this writing. I can’t afford food, medication, internet access, medical services, or the Bay Area’s rent. My rent is overdue due, and if it’s not paid within the month, they’ll start the eviction…
My Personal Goals and Impetus I care about user privacy, possibly to an unhealthy degree. Since May this year, I’ve been developing an iOS app to largely automate the discovery of privacy flaws, including data that Apple forgot that can leak personal information or expose unique identifiers. These leaks allow the bad guys (malware vendors, Facebook, unscrupulous ad companies, and so forth) to…
A little bit of History I thought it’d be helpful to have a retrospective of a little reverse-engineering task I did about 20 years ago, when Mac OS X 10.4.x was at the dawn of the PowerPC to Intel transition. (Mac OS X 10.5 was the first merged release.) I gathered all this information through reverse engineering, including reading PowerPC disassembly and using a debugger. None of the information…
A few nights ago I was updating some not-to-be-named software on my laptop. This piece of software had a few passwords stored in the Keychain . Since said application was recently updated and therefore the code was modified, the system asked me if I wanted to give access to the keychain to this updated application. The dialog that it shown to the user is shown below: Bad things happened when I…
Update: I've reposted this blog entry here on Squarespace as a test. Some links do not work any more and some information is outdated, but the facts remain facts. Update 2015-06-16 : Common sense has won! Mac OS X 10.11 "El Jefe" removes the Repair Permissions functionality ! And it now automatically checks for proper permissions during a Mac OS X Update or Security Update! Quoth the Raven: «…