12 Nov 1999 | Print  |

Avoid AKUA Interactive's Nine 11 Utility!

by TidBITS Staff

AKUA Interactive Media has released an extension called Nine 11 that prevents Mac OS 9 from stopping certain incompatible programs with error number 119. To quote MWJ publisher and TidBITS contributor Matt Deatherage, this is "an indescribably irresponsible idea roughly on par with disconnecting the buzzers in your smoke detectors." As we explained in "Mac OS 9 Installation & Compatibility" in TidBITS 503, to increase the maximum number of open file forks in Mac OS 9, Apple had to change the file control block (FCB) table that the Mac OS uses to track open files. Even with all their resources, there was no way Apple could maintain compatibility with old code that ignored Apple's recommendations and accessed the FCBs directly. So Mac OS 9 prevents programs from doing that, because code that goes directly to the FCBs would be likely to crash the system or corrupt data on your hard disk. Why is this? Applications accessing the FCBs probably want to read data about which files are open, but because of the changes in Mac OS 9, those applications will read the wrong data. If that application then uses that incorrect information as input for other disk-related functions, disk corruption is likely. In short, if you see this utility online, do not download it and warn anyone using it that they do so at significant risk.

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