New plugin in 10.4.7

Question

hey guys,
I found this discussion somewhere else, but no one came up with an answer: any takers here? (PS, I'm totally ignorant of what it is, just copying and pasting):
The very, very recently released Mac OS X 10.4.7 update installs something called "VerifiedDownloadPlugin.plugin" inside /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/
...[snip]...
and then someone theorized: "It's probably for the new feature of 10.4.7 that verifies that Apple-featured Dashboard widgets you download are intact when you install them. It's in the documentation for the update."
...[snip again]...
however, according to another person, "It seems to do nothing. The executable file has 20 instructions in its __TEXT section. There are no included symbols. rsrc file is a couple string resources that repeat "Verified Download Plugin" over and over."
any ideas?
thanks,
s
iMac 2.0G5   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

Answer 1

Update: this looks like a plausible answer:
he code in the internet plugin (in the __TEXT section) is setting up two function pointers to dynamically relocated (or dynamically generated) code. See Listing 2 on this page for a commented example.
The __DATA section contains what I think are two dummy words that are replaced at runtime with branches to the new locations, and a third dummy word that is replaced with a data pointer.
When executed, the code will figure out the position-dependent memory location of the word that's position-independently located at 0x1004 (the first word of the data section) and jump to it with $r12 pointing to the dummy data word. The second function does the same, but uses the second word of the data section and has no parameter.
In other words, here's the __DATA section:
struct {
void *func1Parameter;
void * (*func1)();
void * (*func2)();
I'd guess that the use of all of this is to allow VerifiedDownloadAgent to be used from within the same application context as Safari.