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Comment by nunez | Hacker News Reader

This brought me back to college and me learning about steganography. I wonder how many images are floating around with secret messages in them! Also reminds me of people who immortalized themselves by putting their initials or a favorite phrase in the header of a file format that got popular (like Mike did at Microsoft for .exe's; every exe header starts with MZ, which is really friggin cool)

Or the "Don't Steal MacOS.kext" that was used to prevent Hackintoshes from booting if it was messed with

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On a tangent re: immortality: reminds me of the names you'd see in splash screens of various products. After one too many years of seeing “Seetharaman Narayanan” in the Photoshop splash screen, I just had to look him up.

https://www.ironicsans.com/2006/09/interview_seetharaman_nar...

I read the first sentence of your comment and I immediately thought of Photoshop. Good idea to have that splash screen, huh.

To clarify why that's supposed to be cool, "MZ" are the initials of Mark Zbikowski, one of the leading developers of MS-DOS.

I was REing my insulin pump's uploader at one point, and found that it would always send the phrase "all's well that ends well" to the server as part of the handshake

This isn't steganography though, it's a string compiled into an executable. It's not hidden.

Ahhh DSMOS.kext - that's a throwback!

> The extension contains a kernel function called page_transform() that performs AES decryption of "apple-protected" programs. A system lacking a proper key will not be able to run the Apple-restricted binaries, which include Dock, Finder, loginwindow, SystemUIServer, mds, ATSServer, backupd, fontd, translate, or translated.

Or "Help, I'm being held prisoner in a software factory!" in an invisible part of a dialog template.

Somewhere I’ve heard that you could replace MZ with ZM and exe will continue to work. Never tried it though.

I just tried it and it does not work, at least on Windows 10.

I just tried it under DOSBox, and it works.

Hackintoshes did not necessarily steal MacOS, you could buy legit copies of MacOS.

You could purchase a DVD containing MacOS, but calling them "legit" (as far as installing on a Hackintosh) is a stretch. You're paying for the physical disc, not a license to the OS. The only way to get a license to use MacOS is to purchase a Mac.

To elaborate on this: Apple's license only permits installing Max OS X/OS X/macOS on "Apple branded" computers, so it's technically illegal to install it on Hackintoshes, no matter whether you bought the OS or not.

You could replace the innards of a PowerMac or whatnot with a modern system, and it would still be "Apple-branded".

It's just occurred to me that Apple's move away from the x86 platform has pretty much signed the death warrant of the Hackintosh.

The Hackintosh has been de facto dead for years, yeah. It's going to be worse now that they are moving to their super proprietary ARM stack

You still can: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/D6106Z/A/os-x-lion

Even if they stop selling it on the App Store, you can still buy a fully licensed copy of OSX buy picking up an older Mac Mini.

I have a Snow Leopard CD somewhere

I worked with someone, who previously worked at a hard drive manufacturer, whose initials are coincidentally valid hexadecimal digits. He told me a story how as a low-level firmware programmer, he was in the position to immortalize his initials as the two digit (one byte) magic number that starts some sort of internal control block used by that company's hard drives. Of course, he didn't tell them it was chosen because it was his initials...

Not a person immortalised but lp0 on fire[0] has made me chuckle for two decades. And it made it to this day:

> The "on fire" message remains in the Linux source code as of version 5.14-rc6

Tangent: I actually experienced this message multiple times over the aforementioned timeframe.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire

Good old days, when people shared their files through Steam artworks pictures (png)

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