Apple Crippled Its DTrace Port 476
Linnen writes in to note that one of developers of Sun's open source system tracing tool, DTrace, has discovered that Apple crippled its port of the tool so that software like iTunes could not be traced. From Adam Leventhal's blog: "I let it run for a while, made iTunes do some work, and the result when I stopped the script? Nothing. The expensive DTrace invocation clearly caused iTunes to do a lot more work, but DTrace was giving me no output. Which started me thinking... did they? Surely not. They wouldn't disable DTrace for certain applications. But that's exactly what Apple's done with their DTrace implementation. The notion of true systemic tracing was a bit too egalitarian for their classist sensibilities..."
DRM? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:DRM? (Score:2, Interesting)
Luckily... (Score:5, Interesting)
* If the thread on which this probe has fired belongs to a process marked P_LNOATTACH
* then this enabling is not permitted to observe it. Move along, nothing to see here.
*/
Luckily no malicious programmer will mark their malware's process with this flag!
Re:Luckily... (Score:2, Interesting)
it's kdawson day (Score:3, Interesting)
One question: (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:DRM bad, but "classist sensibilities"? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?"
Headline: Slashbot learns from masters... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not that I mind, but suddenly I feel at least 50% less efficient.
Re:Luckily... (Score:3, Interesting)
One step back (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it's annoying - every time we examine the system we are now looking at everything except for iTunes (and possibly Spy-WaR3 ;-). But this issue is about more than just that.
I've introduced DTrace to many companies. While most people love it, some developers of closed source software are concerned about people DTracing their code. DTrace allows customers to gather proof of bugs that are embarrassing, hard to fix, or that the developers have deny existed. I've been asked many times if DTrace can be disabled for an application, usually to avoid negative publicity from the bugs that DTrace will expose. The answer has always been no. It's been great to see developers accept this reality and escelate bug fixing.
This is expected - DTrace visibility should improve overall code quality in IT. Hopefully it will also encourage employers to hire better programmers - since if customers don't use DTrace to point out embarassing bugs, then competitors may. It also erodes reasons to stay closed source - customers can use DTrace to see the code anyway.
Giving developers another option, to disable DTrace visibility, is allowing a backwards step from the future.
OS-X itself (Score:4, Interesting)
You can argue till your blue in the face that they need to do this, doesn't change what they are doing. If it wasn't DRM'd, it'd run fine on any hardware that met its technical requirements.
Corporations Ethics (Score:1, Interesting)
You may choose to associate with GE, and yet still have objections the Ford plant next door putting out high quantities of Carbon Monoxide. You may also have objections to freely associating with GE, and discovering after working there for 20 years that they release enough benzene into the environment in your plant to triple your cancer risk.
Now, is disabling one tool very few people use worth government action to stop it. Perhaps not. Is disabling one tool very few people use a reasonable thing for a private individual responsible for keeping his own company's network secure something he should consider before allowing this vendors products inside his firewall? Different question.
Re:Luckily... (Score:3, Interesting)
Google says Results 1 - 10 of about 21,900 for "move along, nothing to see here" -slashdot. That makes it 70,000 hits mentioning slashdot, 22000 that don't.
Re:The point of the article (Score:3, Interesting)
In what situation is this a problem if you are not probing iTunes? If you're trying to get info from another program, iTunes won't be the application currently runing on the CPU when the event happens.
Explain Amazon? (Score:1, Interesting)
Well, they're selling mp3's on amazon with no DRM.
Or are you going to give the credit to apple for that? Next thing you know, you'll be saying "this isn't so bad" and follow it up with "the record labels have the right to protect their property".
Re:OS-X itself (Score:2, Interesting)
The trade-off of course, if you want to get on-board you had better get a Mac, because Mac OS X runs on a Mac. You can whine and moan all day long about how that mean Apple doesn't support using OS X on commodity hardware to reduce their support costs. On the other hand, you can realize that OS X doesn't carry enough value itself to justify having to buy extra hardware to use it and go along your merry way with Ubuntu or Windows or whatever tool has justifiable value to you.
Re:DRM? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:2, Interesting)
Hardly a bug worthy of saying "Apple crippled its dtrace port."