So long, cheesegrater

9To5Mac is reporting that Apple has confirmed the Mac Pro is no longer for sale, and indeed, although it was up yesterday, today it's gone.

And are you surprised? After all, Macs have their own bespoke GPUs now, and RAM is on-die. (Glad I sprang for the 16GB option on my M1 Air — that has greatly lengthened its useful service life.) If Apple isn't shipping computers with DIMM slots anymore, then why would they ship PCIe slots for anything else? It wasn't like there were many options you could put in the last iteration anyway, because it too had a non-upgradeable GPU and fixed RAM. Okay, okay, you could stick a whole bunch of NVMe sticks in it and it had good cooling. Was that worth it?

This marks the end of the venerable tower Macs that we loved in the PowerPC days. The Mac Studio is the new Mac Pro. We were always at war with Eastasia.

Mac history echoes in current Mac operating systems

Ars Technica mentioned that in macOS Tahoe the venerable old hard disk icons will be replaced with new, more generic, relatively less interesting equivalents. This process also apparently happens with Apple CEOs from time to time. If you are on Sequoia and want to keep them for posterity, you can get them out of /System/Library/Extensions/IOStorageFamily.kext/Contents/Resources. I'm still impressed to this day that someone not only took the time to write actually plausible text copy for the label, but also gave it Torx screws. Get out your T8 MacCracker for this drive:

This isn't the only echo of Macs past in the operating system. The Spacebar also noticed that Apple Symbols still has many old, nay, "obsolete" icons that are only of use to people who still use web browsers on Power Macs.

That's not the half of it, though. There's a bunch more in that file than the ones he spotted. Here's what I saw; perhaps you can find more.

In order: PowerPC logo, composite video out and in, S-video out and in (such as seen on some later PowerBooks), modem port, combined modem/printer port (like on the Duo 2300), printer port, SCSI, Ethernet (also AAUI), three glyphs for Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) ports, a server, rainbow outline Apple, Balloon Help (from System 7), Apple Guide (7.5), 5.25" floppy (I guess mostly for the Apple II folks), two Newton lightbulbs, Newton undo, Newton extras, Newton dates, Newton names, high-density 3.5" disk icon, a confused Compact Mac (possibly to evoke the flashing question mark when it can't find a bootable volume), classic QuickTime logo, busy watch, Apple Pro Speakers port (such as on the iMac G4 or the MDD G4), FireWire, programmer's key icon, and two versions of the reset icon, though these three do have Unicode equivalents or you can also use regular geometric shapes, and sometimes those faced the other way.

(A note on most of these characters is that they don't actually map to any defined Unicode code point; they are unconnected glyphs. Font Book will show them but you can't really copy them anywhere. A tool like Ultra Character Map will let you at least grab a graphical representation and paste it somewhere, as I have done here.)

But that's not all! Feast your eyes on what's still in /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources!

macOS Tahoe

It's WWDC again, and Apple has turned the volume knob to add 11, jumping from 15 to 26 with macOS Tahoe. Meanwhile, Tahoe keeps Intel Mac owners blue by eliminating support for all but four models — and Intel MacBook Airs and minis are SOL. In fact, assuming macOS 27 Earlimart Ceres Lathrop drops Intel Macs completely (which seems most likely), that would have been six years of legacy support since Apple silicon was first surfaced in 2020, right up to seven for critical updates with Apple's typical year-over-year support history. Power Macs got from 2006 during Tiger to 2011 when Lion came out and Leopard updates ceased. Rosetta may have been a factor in Steve Jobs dropping the PowerPC like a bad habit, but it seems like Rosetta 2 (or at least the lack of Apple Intelligence) is making Tim Cook kick Intel to the curb nearly as quickly.

And Liquid Glass? Translucency? Transparency? Isn't that ... Aqua? The invisible menu bar and control centre is an interesting touch but sounds like a step backwards in accessibility (or at least visual contrast). I also look forward to the enhanced Spotlight actually finding anything in a way Sequoia on this M1 Air doesn't. Which will probably not make it to macOS 28 either.

[UPDATE: Apple has made it official — 27 will drop all Intel Macs, though 26 will get support until fall 2028, so Power Macs really did get screwed. Simultaneously, in or around macOS 28 Stockton, Rosetta 2 will become limited to only a subset of apps and the virtualization framework. Hope you didn't buy one of the new cheesegrater Intel Mac Pros, because you just got the Tim Cook version of IIvxed.]

A PowerBook G4 reporting the news

The San Francisco Chronicle had an article today on the retirement of KCBS political reporter Doug Sovern. I'm an all-news-radio junkie and I happen to enjoy his pieces when I'm in the Bay Area, but that wouldn't merit a mention here except for this photo:

This is a KCBS photo of Sovern filing a report, or something, at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. (No politics in the comment section, please.) Although the camera's white balance was displeasingly set somewhere between lemon and urine sample, or there was an inopportune incandescent bulb in the way, he's quite clearly typing on a late-model 15" PowerBook G4 — besides the dead-on match for the ports and power supply, the MacBooks of the era have a different keyboard and an iSight in the screen bezel which this one doesn't. The screen is difficult to see clearly but looks like Safari viewing Sovern's own site ("Sovern Nation") on KCBS, and the menu bar seems consistent with Tiger. While it would have been only a couple years into the Intel transition at this point, it's nice to see it still being used.

Other points of interest include all the good old analogue equipment (probably for pool audio), an ugly PC laptop with what looks like a Designed for Windows XP sticker being used by somebody with a bandanna, and in the foreground a touch-tone landline phone, which might as well be an alien artifact to anyone younger than a certain age. Enjoy your retirement, Doug.

February patch set for TenFourFox

I was slack on doing the Firefox 128ESR platform rebase for TenFourFox, but I finally got around tuit, mostly because I've been doing a little more work on the Quad G5 and put some additional patches in to scratch my own itches. (See, this is what I mean by "hobby mode.")

The big upgrade is a substantial overhaul of Reader Mode to pick up interval improvements in Readability. I remind folks that I went all-in on Reader Mode for a reason: it's lightweight, it makes little demands of our now antiquated machines (and TenFourFox's antiquated JavaScript runtime), and it renders very, very fast. That's why, for example, you can open a link directly in Reader Mode (right-click, it's there in the menu), the browser defaults to "sticky" Reader Mode where links you click in an article in Reader Mode stay in Reader Mode (like Las Vegas) until you turn it off from the book icon in the address bar, and you can designate certain sites to always open in Reader Mode, either every page or just subpages in case the front page doesn't render well — though that's improved too. (You can configure that from the TenFourFox preference pane. All of these features are unique to TenFourFox.) I also made some subtle changes to the CSS so that it lays out wider, which was really my only personal complaint; otherwise I'm an avid user. The improvements largely relate to better byline and "fluff" text detection as well as improved selection of article inline images. Try it. You'll like it.

I should note that Readability as written no longer works directly on TenFourFox due to syntactic changes and I had to do some backporting. If a page suddenly snaps to the non-Reader view, there was an error. Look in the Browser console for the message and report it; it's possible there is some corner I didn't hit with my own testing.

In addition, there are updates to the ATSUI font blacklist (and a tweak to CFF font table support) and a few low-risk security patches that likely apply to us, as well as refreshed HSTS pins, TLS root certificates, EV roots, timezone data and TLDs. I have also started adding certain AI-related code to the nuisance JavaScript block list as well as some new adbot host aliases I found. Those probably can't run on TenFourFox anyway (properly if at all), but now they won't even be loaded or parsed.

The source code can be downloaded from Github (at the command line you can also just do git clone https://github.com/classilla/tenfourfox.git) and built in the usual way. Remember that these platform updates require a clobber, so you must build from scratch. I was asked about making TenFourFox a bit friendlier with Github; that's a tall order and I'm still thinking about how, but at least the wiki is readable currently even if it isn't very pretty.

CHRP removal shouldn't affect Linux Power Macs

A recent patch removed support for the PowerPC Common Hardware Reference Platform from the Linux kernel. [UPDATE: Looks like this has been retracted.] However, Power Macs, even New World systems, were never "pure" CHRP, and there were very few true CHRP systems ever made (Amiga users may encounter the Pegasos and Pegasos II, but few others existed, even from IBM). While Mac OS 8 had some support for CHRP, New World Macs are a combination of CHRP and PReP (the earlier standard), and the patch specifically states that it should not regress Apple hardware. That said, if you're not running MacOS or Mac OS X, you may be better served by one of the BSDs — I always recommend NetBSD, my personal preference — or maybe even think about MorphOS, if you're willing to buy a license and have supported hardware.

macOS Sequoia

Do you like your computers to be big, fire-prone and inflexible? Then you'll love macOS Sequoia, another missed naming opportunity from the company that should have brought you macOS Mettler, macOS Bolinas (now with no support for mail), or macOS Weed. Plus, now you'll have to deal with pervasive ChatGPT integration, meaning you won't have to watch the next Mission: Impossible to find out what the Entity AI will do to you.

Now that I've had my cup of snark, though, Intel Mac users beware: this one almost uniformly requires a T2 chip, the Apple A10 derivative used as a security controller in the last generation of Intel Macs, and even at least one Mac that does have one isn't supported (the 2018 MacBook Air, presumably because of its lower-powered CPU-GPU, which is likely why the more powerful 2019 iMac without one is supported, albeit incompletely). It would not be a stretch to conclude that this is the final macOS for Intel Macs, though Rosetta 2's integration to support x86_64 in VMs means Intel Mac software will likely stay supported on Apple silicon for awhile. But that shouldn't be particularly surprising. What I did find a little more ominous is that only the 2020 MacBook Air and up is supported in their price segment, and since those Macs are about four years old now, it's possible some M1 Macs might not make the jump to macOS 16 either — whatever Apple ends up calling it.

Donnie Darko uses OS X

I think it's been previously commented upon, but we were watching Donnie Darko over the weekend (controversial opinion: we prefer the director's cut, we think it's an improvement) and noticed that Donnie's reality is powered by a familiar processor and operating system. These are direct grabs from the Blu-ray.

The entirety of the crash dump can't be seen and the scenes in which it/they appear are likely a composite of several unrelated traces, but the first two shots have a backtrace showing symbols from Unsanity Application Enhancer (APE), used for adding extra functionality to the OS like altering the mouse cursor and system menus. However, its infamous in-memory monkeypatching technique could sometimes make victim applications unstable and was unsurprisingly a source of some early crash reports in TenFourFox. (I never supported it for that reason, refused to even use it on principle, and still won't.) As a result, it wouldn't have been difficult for the art department to gin up a genuine crash backtrace as an insert. The second set of grabs appears when the Artifact returns to the Primary Universe and the Tangent Universe is purged (not a spoiler because it will make no sense to anyone who hasn't seen the movie).

All four are specific to the director's cut that premiered theatrically in May 2004. While APE was available at least as far back as Puma, i.e., OS X 10.1, Puma didn't come out until September 2001, months after the movie premiered in January of that year. In fact, the original movie is too early even for the release of Cheetah (10.0) in March. The first two images don't give an obvious version number but the second set shows a Darwin kernel version of 6.1, which corresponds to Jaguar 10.2.1 from September 2002. Although Panther 10.3 came out in October 2003, the recut movie would have moved to post-production (in its fashion) by then, and the shots may well have been done near the beginning of production when early versions of Jag remained current.

I'm waiting on the next Firefox ESR (128) in July, and there will be at least some maintenance updates then, so watch for that.

One less Un*xy option for 32-bit PowerPC

Most of you still using a Power Mac as a daily or occasional driver are probably either running Linux, Tiger or Leopard, and a minority on OS 9. Despite many distributions no longer shipping 32-bit PPC installs, Gentoo Linux still has specific support along with a few others, as does Adélie Linux if you like musl for breakfast. Still, for server duties, where I come from, you bring on the BSDs. In this blog you've already met my long-suffering NetBSD Macintosh IIci which is still trucking to this day and more recently my also-NetBSD G4 Mac mini (which later needed, effectively, a logic board swap), but I also have a Quadra 605 with a full '040 running NetBSD I use for utility tasks and at one time I ran an intermediate incarnation of gopher.floodgap.com on a Power Macintosh 7300 with a Sonnet G3 running NetBSD too. I stuffed that system full with a gig of RAM and a SATA card and it did very well until I got the current POWER6 server in 2010.

NetBSD has the widest support, continuing to run on most 68Ks and PCI Power Macs to this day (leaving out only the NuBus Power Macs which aren't really supported by much of anything anymore, sadly). However, OpenBSD works fine on New World Macs, and FreeBSD has a very mature 32-bit PowerPC port — or, should I say, soon will have had one, since starting in FreeBSD 15 (13.x is the current release), ARMv6, 32-bit Intel and 32-bit PowerPC support will likely be removed. No new 32-bit support will be added, including for RISC-V.

Even though I have a large number of NetBSD systems, I still like FreeBSD, and one of my remote "island" systems runs it. The differences between BSDs are more subtle than with Linux distributions, but you can still enjoy the different flavours that result, and I even ported a little FreeBSD code to the NetBSD kernel so I could support automatic restarts after a power failure on the G4 mini. The fact that the userland and kernel are better matched together probably makes the BSDs better desktop clients, too, especially since on big-endian we're already used to some packages just not building right, so we don't lose a whole lot by running it. (Usually those are the same packages that wouldn't build on anything but Linux anyway.)

This isn't the end for the G5, which should still be able to run the 64-bit version of FreeBSD, and OpenBSD hasn't voiced any firm plans to cut 32-bit loose. However, NetBSD supports the widest range of Macs, including Macs far older than any Power Mac, and frankly if you want to use a Un*x on a Power Mac and have reasonable confidence it will still be running on it for years to come, it's undeniably the one with the best track record.

Google ending Basic HTML support for Gmail in 2024

Understandably they're saying little about it publicly, but word is getting around that Google's fast, super-compatible Basic HTML mode for Gmail will be removed in a few short months. "We’re writing to let you know that the Gmail Basic HTML view for desktop web and mobile web will be disabled starting early January 2024. The Gmail Basic HTML views are previous versions of Gmail that were replaced by their modern successors 10+ years ago and do not include full Gmail feature functionality."

There are also reports that you can't set Basic HTML mode now either. Most of you who want to use it probably already are, but if you're not, you can try this, this, this, this or even this to see if it gets around the front-end block.

Google can of course do whatever they want, and there are always maintenance costs to be had with keeping old stuff around — in this case, for users unlikely to be monetized in any meaningful fashion because you don't run all their crap. You are exactly the people Google wants to get rid of and doing so is by design. As such, it's effectively a giant "screw you," and will be a problem for those folks relying on this for a fast way to read Gmail with TenFourFox or any other limited system. (Hey, wanna buy a Pixel 8 to read Gmail?)

Speaking of "screw you," and with no small amount of irony given this is published on a Google platform, I certainly hope the antitrust case goes somewhere.

WebP chemspill patch on Github

A fix is in the TenFourFox tree for MFSA 2023-40, a/k/a CVE-2023-4863, which is a heap overflow in the WebP image decoder. Firefox 45 would not ordinarily be vulnerable to this but we have our own basic WebP decoder using Google's library, so we are technically exploitable as well. I was working on a fix of my own but the PM27 fix that roytam1 cherrypicked is cleaner, so I've added that patch and one two (a followup was needed) more for correctness. Although this issue is currently being exploited in the wild, it would require a PowerPC-specific attack to be successful on a Power Mac. You do not need to clobber to update your build.

August patch set for TenFourFox

The next patch set has landed, bringing the TenFourFox security base up to 115ESR. This includes the usual new certificate roots and updates to pins, HSTS and TLDs, as well as applicable security updates such as a full pull-up to the browser's SCTP support (not that this is frequently used in TenFourFox but rather to make future patches a little more tractable). On the bug fix side there is an update to the ATSUI font blocklist (thanks Chris T) and a wallpaper for a JavaScript-related crash on apple.com (thanks roytam1). Finally, basic adblock has been made stricter and is now also targetting invasive fingerprinting scripts. This adds a bit more overhead to checking the origin but that all runs at native C++ speed, and ensures we're less likely to get bogged down running JavaScript that we'd really rather not.

As this is a base pullup, building this time around will require a full clobber, so be sure to clear out everything before you begin.

For our next set, I'm thinking of an update to Reader Mode, since I firmly believe that's one of the most useful modes to run TenFourFox in on limited Power Mac hardware. That's why we made it sticky and provided a way to automatically open it by site (under Preferences, TenFourFox) — on resource-limited systems a resource-light view of a resource-heavy page is pretty much the way to go. And isn't everything resource-heavy to a Power Mac?

Floodgap downtime

Just a quick note: Floodgap is down due to upstream issues beyond their control. I'm hoping we'll be back up in a day or two more. Sorry about that. E-mail still works, so anything you've sent me will still get through; this only affects the Web and gopher servers.

Apple provides grated cheese with the wine

Today Apple asked, would you like cheese with your wine?

It's nice that the stench of Intel has finally drifted off Apple's product line, leaving us once again with a RISC cheese grater atop the heap. Still, though (seriously now), no discrete GPUs for those six PCIe slots? Does this mean you're stuck with the MKULTRA M2 Ultra's? That's like throwing a party where you have to wear headphones to hear the music. But at least if you were using it for virtualized x86_64 workloads, Rosetta 2's got you covered, and no one's gonna pull an IBM QuickTransit this time — suggesting x86_64 binaries will have a far longer shelf life on Apple silicon than PowerPC binaries ever did on Intel. At $7000 for the base model, though, I think I'll stick to my Raptor Talos II.

Apple also proved themselves able and willing to compete in drinking games with macOS Sonoma (but fine vintages, mind you), so start your photocopiers. Quick, drink if you thought Apple would basically bring back the Dashboard, which is the first thing I disable when installing Tiger from scratch. If you're Mozilla, drink if you thought Apple would rip off Firefox containers in Safari. And, well, I should have a drink too, because now Power Mac upgraders will get a built-in TenFourFoxBox for desktop web apps. We didn't get macOS Arvin, macOS Edison (now with more power saving features!) or macOS Chico, but don't worry: it will still cost Peanuts.

Don't get me started on that goggles thing.

April patch set for TenFourFox

As promised, there are new changesets to pick up in the TenFourFox tree. (If you're new to rolling your own TenFourFox build, these instructions still generally apply.) I've tried to limit their scope so that people with a partial build can just pull the changes (git pull) and gmake -f client.mk build without having to "clobber" the tree (completely erase and start over). You'll have to do that for the new ESR when that comes out in a couple months, but I'll spare you that today. Most of these patches are security-related, including one that prevents naughty cookies which would affect us as well, though the rest are mostly crash-preventers and would require PowerPC-specific attacks to be exploitable. There is also an update to the ATSUI font blacklist. As always, if you find problematic fonts that need to be suppressed, post them to issue 566 or in the comments, but read this first.

However, there is one feature update in this patchset: a CSS grid whitelist. Firefox 45, which is the heavily patched underpinning of TenFourFox FPR, has a partially working implementation of CSS grid as explained in this MDN article. CSS grid layout is a more flexible and more generalized way of putting elements on a page than the earlier tables method. Go ahead and try to read that article with the current build before you pull the changes and you'll notice that the page has weirdly scrunched up elements (before a script runs and blanks the whole page with an error). After you build with the updates, you'll notice that while the page still doesn't lay out perfectly right, you can now actually read things. That's because there's a whitelist entry now in TenFourFox that allows grid automatically on developer.mozilla.org (a new layout.css.grid.host.developer.mozilla.org preference defaults to true which is checked for by new code in the CSS parser, and there is also an entry in the problematic scripts filter to block the script that ends up blanking the page when it bugs out). The other issues on that page are unrelated to CSS grid.

This will change things for people who set the global pref layout.css.grid.enabled to true, which we have never shipped in TenFourFox because of (at times significant) bugs in the implementation. This pref is now true, but unless the URL hostname is in the whitelist, CSS grid will still be disabled dynamically and is never enabled for chrome resources. If you set the global pref to false, however, then CSS grid is disabled everywhere. If you were using this for a particular site that lays out better with grid on, post the URL to issue 659 or in the comments and I'll consider adding it to the default set (or add it yourself in about:config).

The next ESR (Firefox 115) comes out end of June-early July, and we'll do the usual root updates then.

Power Mac ransomware? Yes, but it's complicated

Wired ran an article today (via Ars Technica) about apparent macOS-compatible builds of LockBit, a prominent encrypting ransomware suite, such as this one for Apple silicon. There have been other experimental ransomware samples that have previously surfaced but this may be the first known example of a prominent operation specifically targeting Macs, and it is almost certainly not the last.

What caught my eye in the article was a report of PowerPC builds. I can't seem to get an alleged sample to analyse (feel free to contact me at ckaiser at floodgap dawt com if you can provide one) but the source for that assertion appears to be this tweet.

Can that file run on a Power Mac? It appears it's indeed a PowerPC binary, but the executable format is ELF and not Mach-O, so the file can only run natively on Linux or another ELF-based operating system, not PowerPC Mac OS X (or, for that matter, Mac OS 9 and earlier). Even if the raw machine code were sprayed into memory for an exploitable Mac application to be tricked into running, ELF implies System V ABI, which is similar but different from the PowerOpen ABI used for PowerPC-compatible versions of Mac OS, and we haven't even started talking about system calls. Rather than a specific build targetting Power Macs, most likely this is evidence that the LockBit builders simply ran every crosscompiler variation they could find on their source code: there are no natively little-endian 32-bit PowerPC CPUs, for example, yet there's a ppcle build visible in the screenshot. Heck, there's even an s390x build. Parents, don't let your mainframes out unsupervised.

This is probably a good time to mention that I've been working on security patches for TenFourFox and a couple minor feature adjustments, so stay tuned. It's been awhile but such are hobbies.

September patch set for TenFourFox

102 is now the next Firefox Extended Support Release, so it's time for spring cleaning — if you're a resident of the Southern Hemisphere — in the TenFourFox repository. Besides refreshing the maintenance scripts to pull certificate, timezone and HSTS updates from this new source, I also implemented all the relevant security and stability patches from the last gasp of 91ESR (none likely to be exploitable on Power Macs without a direct attack, but many likely to crash them), added an Fx102 user agent choice to the TenFourFox preference pane, updated the ATSUI font blacklist (thanks to Chris T for the report) and updated zlib to 1.2.12, picking up multiple bug fixes and some modest performance improvements. This touches a lot of low-level stuff so updating will require a complete rebuild from scratch (instructions). Sorry about that, it's necessary!

If you're new to building your own copy of TenFourFox, this article from last year is still current with the process and what's out there for alternatives and assistance.

Network Solutions screws the pooch again

Floodgap appears to be down because Network Solutions' name servers are timing out and name queries are not reliably resolving (everything's up on this end). There is no ETA. If this continues for much longer I'll figure out an alternative, but between this and the social engineering hack last year, maybe this is a sign I need to move it to a different registrar even though I prepaid a few years ago.

macOS Oxnard

Those of us in southern California are shaking our heads. I like the City of (San Buena)Ventura fine, but Ventura isn't exactly in the same snobbish class as, you know, Big Sur or Monterey. I mean, if they really wanted they could have had macOS Camarillo, or macOS Thousand Oaks, or maybe even macOS Calabasas even though that sounds those gourd urns you buy at Pier 1 or a euphemism for unmentionable body parts, but anyway. (macOS Malibu! Buy all her friends!) There was a lot of buzz over the possibility this could have been macOS Mammoth, and even Wikipedia went all-in. I can see why they didn't because the jokes would have flown thick and heavy if it turns out as big and ponderous as the name, but when you give up the chance at Point Mugu or Oxnard (or La Conchita: the operating system that collapses on itself!) for a pretty if less ostentatious coastal community, someone at Apple just isn't thinking big. Or, for that matter, mammoth.

April patch set for TenFourFox

I've had my hands full with the POWER9 64-bit JIT (a descendant of TenFourFox's 32-bit JIT), but I had a better idea about the lazy image loader workaround in February's drop and got the rest of the maintenance patches down at the same time. These patches include the standard security fixes and updates to timezones, pinned certificates and HSTS, as well as another entry for the ATSUI font blacklist. In addition, a bug in the POWER9 JIT turns out to affect TenFourFox as well (going back to at least TenFourFox 38), which I ported a fix for. It should correct some residual issues with IonPower-NVLE on a few sites, though it may allow code to run that couldn't run before that may have its own issues, of course. A clobber is not required for this update. The commits are already hot and live on Github.

The next ESR, version 102, is due in June. I'll change the EV and certificate roots over around that time as usual, but we might also take the opportunity to pull up some of the vendored libraries like zlib, so it might be a somewhat bigger update than it would ordinarily be.