On a recent trip to the Apple Store in Regent Street London I noticed all their display machines were running Deep Freeze Mac by software vendor Faronics.

First off my gripe with this is that they are using a 3rd party product to secure their own computers. Come on guys (Apple Geniuses), it reflects poorly on Mac OS X’s built-in security, which is considerable, that they would rely on a foreign product for security.

Secondly it shows a lack of trust for us, the customers. In addition to the S.S. style  security guards in theur black uniforms and the members of staff wearing Jobs outfits, blue jeans and black shirts, who are ready to pounce on any hapless kid who tries to plug his or her iPod or iPhone into one of their Macs (for shame!), now we have display machines which are allegedly bulletproofed from tampering by scarcely trusted customers.

From the blurb: “Deep Freeze Mac helps eliminate workstation damage and downtime by making computer configurations indestructible. Once Deep Freeze Mac is installed on a workstation, any changes made to the computer—regardless of whether they are accidental or malicious—are never permanent. Deep Freeze Mac provides immediate immunity from many of the problems that plague computers today—accidental system misconfiguration, malicious software activity, and incidental system degradation.”

Read the rest here

Do any other Apple Stores use this product?

Anybody know how to crack it? I booted an Apple Store mac into Single User Mode and ran ‘rm -rf *’ for several minutes, to no avail

1. Concept, October 5, 2009:

   Great post. Except deep freeze offer very limited security all one have to do is to install Leopard / Snow leopard on a usb drive, plug it into the mac reboot to the drive and once your are in all changes you make to the system is permanent you could even format their mac. I wouldn’t use deep freeze as a security tool unless its in a area with novice mac users.

2. admin, October 6, 2009:

   interesting! i must say i’m surprised and thought that Deep Freeze prevented booting from an external volume. presumably Apple’s Firmware Password Utility would solve this shortcoming: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/firmware_hardware/openfirmwarepassword.html

3. KO, November 8, 2009:

   Deep Freeze is used at my school on all of the PC’s to make sure that any software problems or misplaced keystrokes can’t permanently disable a computer. It can just restore the whole thing right back to it’s original state (whatever part of the computer they “froze”).

   It’s not necessarily a security thing, it might be a “We don’t want to disable any features (which would interrupt an otherwise smooth user experience), so just do whatever you want, we can always reset it and it’ll be fine” thing.