Maxxuss Site Shutdown, Apple to Blame?
Note: Some of this information may be out of date. Although I provide updates to posts as postscript, many times an entirely new post may be necessary. Click one of the tags above to find the latest entries by the subject matter you are interested in.
In yet another follow-up to my previous posts on Maxxuss cracking OS X 10.4.4, it looks like Maxxuss’ site is down (thanks Zeth for the heads up). A snippet of a post from the front page of OSx86 Project reads:
It appears that Apple may have gotten to Maxxuss, the hacker made famous for his flagrant cracks and patches of Mac OS X for Intel. A visit to his website reveals that his site has been shutdown by his host, the cause of which we do not know at this time.
Although the reasons aren’t very clear at the moment as to what may have happened, there is rampant speculation of everything from exhausting bandwidth to Apple serving a take down notice as it had to the OSx86Project Forums a few days ago. Discussion is continuing on the shutdown in their forums.
According to a post at OSx86China Forum, all requests to:
http://maxxuss.hotbox.ru
are being redirected to:
http://pochta.ru/notfound.php
At the 360 Insider Forums, a message provides a list of links to Google’s cache of Maxxuss’ site.
If Apple has in fact shut down Maxxuss site, then they can learn something from this incident. The x86 community has a history of playing “whac-a-mole” which is defined as:
The term Whac-a-Mole, or Whack-a-mole, has been used in the computer and networking industry to describe the phenomenon fending off recurring spammers, vandals or miscreants. The connotation is that of a repetitious and futile task: each time the attacker is “whacked” or kicked off of a service, he only pops up again from another direction.
It is inevitable that someone will rehost Maxxuss’ pages using either the Google cache versions or a local mirrored copy. Can Apple Legal keep serving take down notices to people scattered all over the globe? It is not likely. Although what is likely is that people with a political axe to grind over free speech issues (but no interest in Apple’s operating system) will take up the call to start disseminating this information. Eventually Maxxuss’ or his successor’s information will make it to a host like HavenCo that has no restrictions on copyright or intellectual property data being hosted on it’s servers or onto the encrypted Tor anonymous network as a hidden service. If history is any indicator then Apple can’t win this battle. Most of the enthusiast work on getting new versions of OS X will continue whether it moves further underground or offshore depends on how hard Apple pushes. If this was truly Apple’s handiwork then it can be firmly said that they may have won this round but the fight is far from over.
Update (2.22.2006): The Maxxuss Patch Solution v1.0 can still be found via Google Germany. Search terms: maxxuss patch solution 09.55
Update (2.22.2006): Maxxuss has a new blog that is up and running. It does not contain any copyrighted material according to him so I think it’s safe to link it. A posting on his site is saying that everyone should bookmark http://maxxuss.tk/ just in case he moves his site again. He has also put up mirrors of his original site:
http://-.host.sk/ and http://-2006.narod.ru/ where “-” is equal to the 7-letter name of our friendly OSx86 hacker.
If there are any other new developments, don’t hesitate to shoot me an e-mail or dropping a comment below. I’ll post updates as this story develops.
As always, I don’t condone piracy so please don’t do anything illegal.
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2005 BRABUS Rocket based on Mercedes-Benz CLS
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How-To: Internet Explorer Warning Infobar
I have received a few emails asking how to implement the Internet Explorer “infobar” warning on their own site. If you don’t know what I’m taking about, when browsing to my blog with Microsoft’s infamously buggy but popular browser, users see this:
Background: I don’t have to preach to the choir about Internet Explorer (IE) having a lot of quirks when it comes to rendering CSS heavy pages in addition to all the security issues plaguing the browser. The theme on this site is a slightly modified version of K2 which still needs some work to make sure it displays properly on IE. Not only do I not have time to fix these bugs myself due to school but more than 80% of my readers use Firefox. I still wanted to display a warning to any IE users letting them know that this site won’t look quite right without using an alternate browser (i.e. Opera, Safari, Konq, Firefox, etc.). Although I’m not afraid to tinker, I don’t enjoy reinventing the wheel so my first hope was finding someone else having coded this before I went at “programming” a little css/javascript myself. Google brought me to a Zatacka.com posting that had the basic CSS and example code ready to go. Interestingly, the Zatacka.com version was a streamlined version of the original author’s code (dead link). However, this minimized version did not scroll with the page in IE because IE does not properly support position: fixed. There were many possible solutions to getting this to work but most involved messing up all position: absolute blocks on the page. Finally, I found a solution that I adapted to work the way I wanted.
Instructions: This is how to add it to your site. (Warning: Your mileage may vary so backup your site before attempting an of this. Don’t come running to me when something goes wrong.)
1. Save warning.gif by right clicking and hitting “Save as…”
Warning.gif Image File
2. Create a file called infobar.css and paste the following code into it. Note that the path to warning.gif must be updated to reflect your site. Then save it.
[code lang="CSS"]
/*
Name: No IE Information Bar
Version: 0.2.6 Minimized
Original: http://minghong.dyndns.org:8080/Software/infobar/
Modified by: http://zatacka.com/index.php/2004/12/ie-warning/ and http://blog.hishamrana.com/
*/
body {
margin: 0;
}
#infobar {
font: message-box;
position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 0px;
z-index: 5; /* Change this value accordingly to reflect your site's setup */
}
body>div#infobar {
position: fixed; /* Hopefully Internet Explorer 7 will parse this tag proporly */
}
#infobar a, #infobar a:link, #infobar a:visited, #infobar a:active {
display: block;
float: left;
clear: both;
width: 100%;
color: InfoText;
background: InfoBackground url('http://path/to/warning.gif') no-repeat fixed .3em .3em; /* Change this path */
border-bottom: .16em outset;
text-align: left;
text-decoration: none;
cursor: default;
padding: .45em 0 .45em 2em;
margin: 0 -2em 0 0;
}
#infobar a:hover {
color: HighlightText;
background-color: Highlight;
}[/code]
3. Modify your site’s template. For K2, I put this all into my header.php file.
Part A: Somewhere right after the tag paste the following (change the path to infobar.css for your site):
[code lang="Javascript"]
[/code]
Part B: Right after tag paste the following:
[code lang="HTML"]
[/code]
That’s it. Let me know if there are any mistakes or a better way of doing this.
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