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Geeks and Greed: A Cautionary Tale


Swad

Someday I may publish a history of how OSx86 was originally hacked to run on PCs. I was privy to many of the conversations between those working on the hacks, and it makes for a fascinating story – one of teamwork, secrecy, and intrigue. There are obviously some serious moral (and legal, as we all know…) issues with the x86 hacks, but the way it happened deserves its place in the annals of computing history.

 

Those events last summer remind me of the effort to get XP booting on the new Macintels. In theory, running XP should be significantly easier than surpassing the TPM restrictions on the Developers Transition Kits. This is the case for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s legal! There should be no secrecy regarding the attempts at getting XP to run – there’s no need for it.

 

Yet why aren’t we dual booting already? Money. Most of you are undoubtedly aware of “The Contest,” a 12,000 dollar pot that will be going to the first person to provide a viable dual booting method to the site’s owner Also note the “onmac” network - and advertisements - that the contest has bequeathed to the once minimalist site as well… another interesting commentary on money.

 

Now I have no problem with the idea of a contest, nor the site owner (Colin… who is also a member in our forum) wanting to capitalize on some great site traffic and press.

 

The problem with the contest is that it encourages poor geeks (like me) who could use the extra cash (like me) to try their hand at fixing the problem. In theory this would speed up progress. But in fact it’s had the opposite, somewhat paradoxical effect – it’s slowed things down.

 

This has occurred because said poor geeks (like me) who are working on it know that if they post on a forum with some ideas, those ideas could be taken and used by someone else to earn the money.

 

It’s happened in our forum already – accusations of “don’t expect me to help you - you’re only doing this to win the prize!” have flown with all the certainty of someone who is secretly jealous they didn’t come up with it first. The technical barriers, while substantial, are not the thing that's keeping us from dual booting.

 

It’s all quite predictable – nothing is getting done because the sharing of information has stopped. Were there no contest, IRC channels would be full of dedicated developers sharing what they’d learned through trial and error, swapping ideas and encouraging each other. I've talked with some people who are very close to success... but their efforts are not public. As it stands, sharing what you’ve learned could cost you $12,000.

 

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a wonderful Humphrey Bogart film from 1948 – it’s one of the best in cinema history. It tells the story of 3 gold prospectors and the ways in which greed can destroy common goals. When it comes time to share with the others his spoils, the character realizes it's much more advantageous to keep his knowledge to himself. I see this situation as much the same.

 

Money makes it anything but a team effort.

 

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The contest is like a game or a race. Why not have the contestants organize themselves into teams and have a mandatory registration before you can submit a solution. That way you'll have at least some cooperation with others.

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Mash those are some true words of wisdom. I say give all the money to a charity program to feed the poor in some third-world country or something (I'm not kidding. I'm completely serious.) Most of what you mentioned were things I sort of noticed myself, and some were strong points I had never thought of. It was like getting hit in the head with a brick. I woke up and realized the true extent of how dumb this thing is.

 

No man is an island. Each man who chooses the path of spiteful isolated greed diminishes me because I'm involved in mankind. We need to act as a whole.

 

Man is designed as a creature that's meant to work in groups. We establish a common language to transmit free flowing ideas, inventions, theories, as well as our errors and corrections. True wisdom is realizing how little you know. The best way to improve wisdom is to share it.

 

Ok enough proverbic fudd for today... :)

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too true man. there are a great many things wrong in the world, and i think many of them are because people forget how to think, learn and discuss.

 

- munky... off to listen to some Bill Hicks to get some spiritual guidance.... :)

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Very well written article, not that I haven't already told you that, but I thought I'd share with everyone else. The origins of it all would be a very interesting read too... :D

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I have problems enough getting my x86 working, let alone dual boot. I lack the hardware to even work on the solution - and I object to the TPM so much I refuse to pay for a computer with it. At least with a TPM I can't unplug or effectively disable entirely.

 

The TPM doesn't need circumvention for OS X, assuming we're talking a genuine iMac Core Duo or MacBook. And XP doesn't need a TPM to work, but does need a BIOS.

 

So it seems there are a very few technical steps to take:

1) Discover what (if any) open source regarding the EFI exists in the Darwin project. See how "bless" dows its job of making an EFI for OS X. We don't need to solve the EFI issue for an Intel mac, just for XP.

 

2) Find whatever open source BIOS equivalent there is to pacify Linux that runs on EFI machines. Unfortunately, I think there's a REAL BIOS on these EFI machines and an Apple would lack that. I honestly don't know if there's an open source BIOS, all of them are so hardware specific. Someone would need to tailor a BIOS to have all the function entry points hooked up to the Apple hardware handling stuff.

 

3) XP tends to never rely on BIOS after it's booted, so some of the EFI to boot XP would be gimpy or not implemented. The big challenge would be to discover what (if any) documentation exists for making a system module for an Apple computer. The device manager is chock full of system modules for PC systems - unfortunately nearly all of them are wrong for the Apple hardware. So this is the biggest hurdle and it would take someone very savvy about the very lowest level underpinnings of XP to create a "motherboard/system" set of hardware interfaces.

 

It's that you may never see spoken of in any forum, public or private, thanks to the Sierra Madre Syndrome.

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success... but their efforts are not public. As it stands, sharing what you’ve learned could cost you $12,000.

 

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a wonderful Humphrey Bogart film from 1948 – it’s one of the best in cinema history. It tells the story of 3 gold prospectors and the ways in which greed can destroy common goals. When it comes time to share with the others his spoils, the character realizes it's much more advantageous to keep his knowledge to himself. I see this situation as much the same.

 

Money makes it anything but a team effort.

 

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To paraphrase Gold Hat from the movie: Contest? We don't need no stinking contest :D

madre7.jpg

However, I think perhaps you are being too cynical. It is probably just too hard to get WinXP to boot on EFI.

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Yeah, I think if you calculate the wage I earned when doing technical work, if I was given an iMac Core Duo to work with, all the Xcode tools and documentation, all the MSDN materials regarding writing low-level hardware drivers to support motherboards and system devices in XP, a real job would pay me more than $12k for the half year or so it'd take me to make a solution.

 

EFI is a minor problem, just create enough of an EFI for Windows that gets the OS loaded and running bootstrap-wise. The big job is coding all those totally-non-PC environment hardware things. The iMac Core Duo is NOT an Intel Reference Platform - maybe in some respects it has some of its old resources, but I bet enough differences to require quite a lot of coding that a very few people on this planet know how to do.

 

I don't even know if people who make motherboard drivers (Intel employees mostly) ever publish their knowledge.

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Well, I've been talking with a few guys, and they seem pretty close using a kind of emulation to get the whole thing working.

 

I'm convinced it can be done. I saw guys getting an OS mostly working with the "mactel" leak back in the day which was basically just a dump of a few files from a hard drive. If they can do that, they can dual boot Windows.

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Someday I may publish a history of how OSx86 was originally hacked to run on PCs.

I would absolutely purchase that book (and not download the torrent of the eBook) :D

Also, I think you are right on target here Mash. I can't wait until several hackers get it working around the same time, and then battle over who was first! How can you really tell definitively? It's not a televised event like when Burt Rutan won the Ansari-X Prize with his team's non-commercial consecutive space flights. :)

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Well, I've been talking with a few guys, and they seem pretty close using a kind of emulation to get the whole thing working.

 

I'm convinced it can be done. I saw guys getting an OS mostly working with the "mactel" leak back in the day which was basically just a dump of a few files from a hard drive. If they can do that, they can dual boot Windows.

Yup, $12k divvied up between people might buy each a new iPod or something :P They are sort of doing Microsoft a favor tho, since XP has a lost of post-install features that require validation, the Genuine Windows Advantage activeX control for one, and the fact releases of IE7 are validating your reg# with Microsoft directly for another...

 

Therefore the only good this dual-boot solution does is allow Microsoft to sell more XP licenses. Just what we always wanted. :angry:

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I would not worry about geeks getting selfish about their information, because of this price.

 

once somebody has got the pot, things are back normal.

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The contest is not detrimental overall because it has a deadline. After April 1st we will have more ideas than we would have had without the contest. Just be patient and let people focus secretly for now and we will reap the benefits later.

 

Alexander the Great

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I completely agree with what you are saying. The progress is certainly not as open as I had thought it would be. It is really unfortunate, because I really wanted to mobilize the community around this goal. At the time I started the contest, Nakk had gotten into the EFI interface and then nothing further happened for almost a week. It looked like there were a lot of people interested, but not a lot of people motivated who a.) had the mac, or b.) had the skills. Money is a fantastic motivator... but it creates a shroud of secrecy because humans are innately greedy, and dont want to share.

 

I think it is wrong to speculate where we would or wouldnt be at this stage with or without the contest. I like to believe that although there is a lot not revealed to the wider internet, progress is happening at a faster pace than it would without an incentive. You may disagree and we have no ability to prove it either way. Maybe we can ask participants if they would have been trying if not for the prize?

 

With regards to using advertising on the site., may I just point out that this noble project also uses it to monetize the traffic. Initially, it was intended to track hits + help pay for costs. I can assure you that with the cost for hosting, the cost for the domain, and not to mention the cost for my time, I would be better focusing more at work and less on the running of the contest. You wont see me driving down the street in a ferrari any time soon - this isnt 1999.

 

Good Luck to everyone!

Colin

 

P.s. for an ironic image - what greedy geeks would be clicking on this ad?

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And now we understand the reason we have ZERO nVidia graphics acceleration! People are so concerned with having their names attached to their hacks that they refuse to share. These guys (macvidia) have had a working nVidia driver (DVI only) for who knows how long now, but refuse to let the community help to complete it! :pirate2:

 

The macvidia beta testers should grow a pair and release it for them. C'mon guys, you have thousands of people who need this! The thought that they have sat on a working driver for over a month now is :) shameful.

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firebush, that may be a little harsh on the macvidia peeps - they're not actually getting anything out of it. I think theirs is a legitimately slow development cycle.

 

Thanks for commenting Colin! Good to hear from you. Yeah, it would be hard to say where we'd be and I think it's anyone's guess. But after talking with people in SSL-encrypted channels deep in the heart of IRC, I realized that the contest was having the opposite effect! But it's also one of those things we didn't know until we got there.

 

And yeah, I'm totally not blaming you, just in case you were worried. I also understand the advertising issue, as this site has to use ads to pay for our hosting as well (and probably an upgraded server very soon). That's a hilarious screenshot - you never know what will pop up with Google ads!

 

But I will have to say you've done a great job organizing the contest! It's just too bad that it hasn't worked out the way we thought it would. It was a great idea and you've done well with it.

 

Perhaps it would be worth adding to the rules of the contest a clause that says "If it's determined that the winner has significantly drawn on the work of others or has collaborated with them in finishing the contest, the prize money will be distributed accordingly." That way people who share their ideas won't have to worry about not being compensated.

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you know another thing thats probably slowing development is the lack of hardware, there are a hell of a lot more geeks with dells and other whitebox's around than those with intel based macs! The sharing of information IS important to the process though if people were freely sharing their work we'd probably have a solution (and I'd probably have purchased a mbp rather than this xps!) The contest was a good idea, and had good intentions but it IS slowing work, perhaps the prize could be shared? Maybe some groups could be organized of people who are close to completion (or think they are lol) the question is would people be too greedy and the answer is probably yes. sadness

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I would suspect Mash is exactly right about the effect of 'the bounty' on cooperative development. You can observe this phenomenon in action quite clearly within the satellite tv underground community. Over there, sat providers will occassionally deploy new encryption techniques of varying degrees of complexity. There is a lot of money to be made in the black market in compromising that encryption. There are also a lot of 'hobbyists' who aren't involved in the black market side, just the personal tinkering aspect.

 

Development of 'solutions' in that community is significantly slowed down by an unwillingness to share meaningful information. Attempts to 'open source' the process are met with resistence and cryptic replies. The stated excuse is that making the information 'too public' would accelerate countermeasures from the providers. While this may or may not be true, the argument falls on its face compared to the power of open development. In practice, the more brains sharing more informaton, the fewer countermeasures providers could successfully deploy.

 

The real driving force behind the dysfunctional sat community is, like Mash describes, greed. There's money to be had, and those trying to get the cash are not interested in exposing their work. As a result, the "community" breaks down and becomes a Lord of the Flies kind of island.

 

On the other hand, the Mac/PC world is a much larger place. I do agree that 'the contest' could be adding drag to the development of a solution, but eventually this wall will fall. Undoubtedly a solution will bubble up, just as it does in the sat community ultimately.

 

Unlike the sat world, I've never been of the opinion that either PC-on-Mac or Mac-on-PC is particularly threatening to anyone's bottomline, even if one direction is more 'legal' than the other. Most Windows users aren't going to be bothered buying Apple's more expensive hardware, and most Mac users aren't going to be bothered jumping through the technical hoops that whiteboxing osx86 will probably always entail. The latter isn't as difficult as Mac users think it is, but it's not as easy as they like, either. Therefore, I see the contest as a bump in the road. However, mashugly makes a percepive observation about group psychology.

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And now we understand the reason we have ZERO nVidia graphics acceleration! People are so concerned with having their names attached to their hacks that they refuse to share. These guys (macvidia) have had a working nVidia driver (DVI only) for who knows how long now, but refuse to let the community help to complete it! :angry:

 

The macvidia beta testers should grow a pair and release it for them. C'mon guys, you have thousands of people who need this! The thought that they have sat on a working driver for over a month now is :censored2: shameful.

 

I've heard its not very good at all. :/

 

Hell, if you want acceleration, buy ATi. :happymac:

 

Till then, quit your :censored2: :withstupid:

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"There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed."

 

I don't remember who said this but I hate to see it happening here. It would seem money isn't the catalyst that was hoped for and lines are being drawn in the sand, divisions being made and even worse knowledge not being shared. I hope it gets hacked soon so cooperation and the knowledge sharing can continue.

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i think a large fact we are overstepping however, is the lack of hardware. For me, a hardline computer expert(just kidding) i have no interest, nor money to afford two systems. I sold my power mac in order to by a macbook, and i think a lot more "pro" people are just waiting for their macbook pros. I think thats why the wait on the macbook pro is 3-4 weeks while the imac is shipped in less than 24 hours. Even colin, who started the contest, was waiting for a macbook pro vs. the imac. so, now that more people are getting hooked in, we'll get more progress, but as far as sharing is concerned, it seems only nakfull is willing to help others. Thanks Nak!

 

Devon

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personally i hope they meet the deadline disperse the cash to the charity and the original donators (as colin has planned) and people start working on this together. great point mashulgy.

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