This will be a working in progress so this post might be updated a few times. As promised, a reader sent me the Mac App Store (MAS) validation guidelines (thank you again!) and I got curious about one detail, the exit(173). This guides states if application fails to validate the receipt because it’s not present, then it should exit with status 173. This status will be interpreted by the system and it will try to obtain a valid receipt – this is the reason why you see that message asking for Sign in when the receipt isn’t valid and you can see the email address of the guy who released that app to the wild....

I have just finished reading the legal papers served against Geohot regarding the PS3 jailbreaking/cracking/private keys/etc. It shows the sad state that we have reached into reverse engineering and society as a whole. It’s a fight between knowledge and profit, and in the middle there is a grey area called piracy. My passion for knowledge is very deep and I like to try to understand everything I can. I remember the day I had my Commodore Amiga 500 and someone sent me a disk with a special menu that I never saw before....

The Mac App Store opened yesterday and a few hours after the web is already full of news about the hacking/cracking/defeat/whatever of the store. When I heard about the Mac App Store, I became curious about how it would handle the serial and other protections of normal applications. I had read an article/news that talked about no more serials since the App Store would handle that – this is logical since you pay first to download the application, so the payment problem is solved....

The original method to hijack sysent table was described by Landon Fuller and then Braden Thomas updated it to Snow Leopard due to new location and lack of nsysent symbol. Charlie Miller and Dino Dai Zovi at The Mac Hacker’s Handbook, have some code to try to automate this search for sysent. I never tried it before and today I decided to hack around it. It suffers from the problem of no nsysent symbol (is there a way to fix it?...

Hi, There is a new GDB Cocoa frontend in town courtesy of Kurt. It’s still in early stages but it’s always interesting to have people developing tools for OS X. Congrats to Kurt. You can contact him at kurt@osxdbg.co.cc for bug reporting! I also bring you two pics from an old HardLock dongle that I found while tidying up some drawers. It’s a parallel port HardLock Eye v4.1b, and it has like 8 years or more (can’t really remember heheh)....