Apple has resorted to a poetic broadside in the inevitable cat-and-mouse game between hackers and high-tech companies. The maker of Macintosh computers had anticipated that hackers would try to crack its new OS X operating system built to work on Intel Corp.’s chips and run pirated versions on non-Apple computers. So, Apple developers embedded a warning deep in the software — in the form of a poem. Indeed, a hacker encountered the poem recently, and a copy of it has been circulating on Mac-user Web sites this week.
The Poem Read’s:
Your karma check for today: There once was a user that whined/his existing OS was so blind/he’d do better to pirate/an OS that ran great/but found his hardware declined./Please don’t steal Mac OS!/Really, that’s way uncool./(C) Apple Computer, Inc.