The Age of Literacy

Where was Tracker?

Get It Try It

ZD might not have this link anymore.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/.../0,39020393,39256044,00.htm

But Wayback does. What a sad story.

http://web.archive.org/.../0,39020393,39256044,00.htm

Let's break it down.

• It's 7 March 2006.

• Apple systems have been hit by a vulnerability related to - unbelievably - Finder.

• The vulnerability doesn't expose a weakness in the Rock Solid Foundation™. It shows how Apple users can be duped. They can be duped because they rely on icons to identify file types and it's been possible to change icon displays in Finder.

• The vulns were building up. iPhone is still a year off. Apple released a patch to fix some twenty 'holes' but they didn't fix this one, and users were not happy.

It's amazing, isn't it. The operating system - no, correct that: the NeXT workspace class NSWorkspace - has a hook that completely obviates this.



It's called 'getInfoForFile: application: type:' and it's related to 'openFile: withApplication' and yes, you guessed right, Apple's ace developers want to deprecate them both because they can't understand what they're supposed to do.



Doug McIlroy once said - prophetically - that the day Apple won't any longer let you open a file because its dedicated editor can't be found is the day that Apple systems are no longer Unix.

That day arrived a long time ago.

Apple fanatics wipe the floor with the disciples of Jim Jones.

Here's reality, you pathetic wusses. All your Swift 'playgrounds' aren't going to help. You have to learn C and it takes years to master. You need to become an adept at Unix and that can take you years more. And you have to have good common sense which most of you obviously don't possess.

Your 'MacOS' file system wasn't compatible with Unix, and your very strange way of thinking isn't compatible with anything or anyone.

You will for your own destruction. You let Apple institute the App Store we warned about. You let them impose draconian restrictions meant to optimise their profits and make you more and more stupid. The whole world gawked as you let that happen.



Now here's a good one to finish up with. That API 'getInfoForFile: application: type:'? Guess what. The NeXT engineers were pretty smart. They foresaw a situation when a client would want to resolve a query about an application itself. As in 'what application opens this application?' Of course the answer is given, but for Apple's - not NeXT's but Apple's - engineers this was too far out. Like trying to figure out why the parent directory of root is root itself. (That puts their noodles on slow overnight bake.)

The flaw, introduced by a typical Apple - not NeXT but Apple - developer, involved somehow getting time to overlook code by NeXT engineers who were in a class that Apple engineers will never approach and then, after scratching his pointy head awhile and exclaiming to himself 'but that doesn't make sense - does it', deciding to SCRATCH THE ENTIRE THING.

So, FOR TWO WHOLE VERSIONS OF THE OS, that call failed, leaving the system in disarray.

It was people at the Rixstep forum who discovered the flaw, it was Rixstep who then notified Apple.

Apple finally relented several months later, announcing to Rixstep that the flaw would be fixed - but only going forward and not through successive patches to their ongoing and earlier OS builds.

But in another year they'd have mobile devices to drool and slobber over.

The Age of Literacy was coming to an end.

You've obviously heard of us, otherwise you wouldn't be here.
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