In the wake of Tuesday’s developer release of macOS Ventura 13.4 beta 3, 9to5Mac has discovered that Apple has taken down the Bitcoin whitepaper that was buried in the system files. In the Image Capture software, the file was particularly found in a folder containing other haphazard contents like other PDF files and photos.
These resources were a part of the “VirtualScanner.app” proprietary utility, which allowed Apple engineers to simulate the scanning and exporting of documents and photographs using the Image Capture app without the need for a scanner. In actuality, the beta no longer contains the whole internal tool.
This largely supports our original hypothesis that the internal tool and the Bitcoin whitepaper were never intended to be discovered by common users. The most likely explanation is that the engineers neglected to take this tool out of the public release of macOS in the past because it contained no sensitive data.
2018’s macOS Mojave appears to have introduced the Bitcoin whitepaper to the system. You may still locate the file even if you haven’t upgraded your Mac to the most recent beta by entering the following command in Terminal:
open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
