Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles

Re:Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles by f2f on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @12:10PM (#6206572)

I'm afraid the title may scare people off the article. i assure you, "hacking" here is used in the canonical sense: "An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed."

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Re:Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles by ot on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @01:22PM (#6206965)

Have you noticed you are posting this on Hacker News? :)

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Re:Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles by f2f on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @01:30PM (#6207013)

... where it will compete with articles about the Star Wars Weather Forecast and discussions on TV programmes. yes, the humour is not lost on me ;)

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Re:Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles by endlessvoid94 on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @01:03PM (#6206864)

I think the "hacking X for fun and profit" is a pretty well-known trope.

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Re:Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles by tonyarkles on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @02:47PM (#6207484)

For me, the origin of this was from "Smashing the stack for fun and profit (1996)"[1], which does actually refer to somewhat malicious purposes. Apparently it has existed in literature for a long time before that though[2].

[1] http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?id=14&issue=49 [2] http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25205/what-is-the...

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Re:Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles by endlessvoid94 on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @04:42PM (#6208142)

Hah, indeed. I had that Aleph One article printed out and stapled, and would carry it with my books in high school!

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Re:Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles by f2f on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @01:07PM (#6206889)

i agree, but the context nowadays is different. you don't often see articles about modifying the binaries of major operating system kernels.

what impressed me most is that the hack worked flawlessly on one of my 10.8.5 pre-release kernels even though it had not been tested there yet.

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