Fuller story here (only for unix hearted!)Apple Kludges. Apple has at a couple of times released installers with permissions that they later decided were incorrect. But the repair process is to simple-minded to just allow them to change the values retroactively. In this case they've added "hint" files in updated versions of Mac OS X that indicate the correct values.
If you've ever seen a message in a permission repair log that refers to special permissions on a file, you've seen this in action. On Jaguar (10.2) this message appeared in reference to a file called hfs.util. On Panther (10.3) it appears in reference to one called cd9660.util.
The annoying thing about this scheme is that this message appears every time you repair permissions-- even if nothing is broken
http://www.atomicbird.com/node/view/29