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Why the World Needs Reverse Engineering
bl968 writes: "Zdnet has an article entitled "Why the world needs reverse engineers." The article covers among many things the Cuecat barcode scanner and some of the reason the hardware or software manufacturers dislike reverse engineering of their products. Privacy violating serial numbers anyone? Security problems and the DMCA are also touched upon."
It's about the only thing that keeps us in control of our environments. If everything is black-boxed, we're at the mercy of faceless corporations and their faceless products.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Reverse engineering allows capitalism to happen in the world of technology, where the "standard" (which is usually defined by whoever comes first) is all-powerful. It's not only just acceptable, it's absolutely necessary if we want the market to move forward.
Reverse engineering is one of the few things consumers can do that can check the quality, integrity, and for the most part, ethics of a company's product. It can be most compared to the government's checks and balances system, except where the real power lies wit hthe consumer in this situation. Almost seems like the exploits that are released for security holes, it might seem evil, but it's needed to keep the corporations on their toes.
Has anyone thought of the idea that reverse engineering might actuallly help the product even become more so of a standard. If to anyone, this would be beneficial to the company. It helps by increasing the capital value of the product. It stupidity that they don't realize this. Luke
A collective community dedicated to reverse engineering, say, the Cuecat would stand a much better chance of fighting the stupidity of the designers claims than if the developers stay in disparate camps. One collective force will put up more of a fight then a bunch of little camps. I think that is probably the only way that reverse engineerings laws will be changed, and even then it is going to take a LONG time.
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It's somewhat hard to imagine why we -wouldn't- need reverse engineering, what with a world of privacy concerns and obscure (and sometimes rather obvious) bugs in commonly used software today. Believe it or not, some companies aren't actually as quick to repair bugs in their software as others are to report them ;> The reverse engineer, in this case, takes it upon themselves to understand and dissect the finished product, dividing it into its component parts until finding the flaw which the designers themselves are reluctant to fix; then code a quick hack to exploit the bug, and hand it out to the blindly gcc'ing script kiddies..once a high-level security flaw is made simple for the kiddiots, designers pick up the pace a little :P What we really owe to reverse engineers is gratitude for explosing the inner workings of that which most of us know little about.
Not only does id not take action against these folks, they support them with code releases from the product and ongoing .plan files describing upcoming tweaks and the algorithms used in the games. Write to the id developers and they are likely to write back, answering questions about the game and encouraging you to write your own tools for it.
These independent tools are what have allowed the game modification (mods) communities to grow around their games and have led to id's real cash cow: licensing game engines. Other game makers license id's engine in part because there are so many tools available for it. In a recent Gamasutra article, the lead programmer for Soldier of Fortune, a new 3D game, talked about why his company chose to license the Quake engine: because the tools created by independent developers for level editing and cut scene creation were so good.
-m
Maybe CueCat will use that wonderful "Oh we knew it was there but we told the engineers to turn it off but they forgot to" excuse like Intel did...
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Let me give you the lowdown
...ESR's example of alchemists - admittedly, that was an argument for open source, but it applies about reverse engineering...
;)
Alchemists hid all their secrets from their peers - as they wanted no-one to have any kind of advantage over their own work... in the end, as they were all working for the same knowledge, they would've been further ahead if they had all shared in the first place...
None of them managed to make gold anyway - as far as I know, that is.
BlackNova Traders
Man it's a scary world we live in when consumers can't tweak products that they own to make them work better. Can you imagine where technology would be today under this premise? How many decades of progress would we miss?
I bet that PC makers would love it though. We'd get a big 2-inch thick steel-cased box and would have to throw it in the trash every two years to upgrade it...
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Let me give you the lowdown
The benefits of reverse engineering apply not only to the consumer world, but also to the coporate world. Consumers get detailed info on the innards of a particular piece of hardware or software, and companies scream bloody murder. What they are ignoring, however, is the opportunity to improve their products. The reverse engineering people are a perfect target market. Companies can give (or sell) initial versions of their products to reverse engineers, in the HOPES that a security flaw or bug will be uncovered. They can reduce their PR problems by fixing the major (and, hopefully, minor) bugs and security holes in their products BEFORE THEY BECOME A MAJOR ISSUE. This benefits companies in another way, as well: a decrease in their quality assurance budgets. By turning over their products to a few people to play with, they don't have to spend hundreds (or, in some cases, dozens) of man-hours testing a product for bugs. You can be sure that reverse engineers will either be pushing the product to the limit, or going over every square inch of it to try to figure out how it works. This brings me to a third point. Companies can use reverse engineers as a test market for new tech toys. Wouldn't it have been nice if Digital Convergence had decided to let people use their devices for USEFUL purposes? They could have found out any number of applications for them by simply giving them out to people who would have some idea of the implications of such devices.
In programming classes, we are given parts of programs to understand what they are doing. When we get an exam in these classes, we have to reverse engineer the program in the question to know what it does. Remember, having to take apart a car engine and put it back together in autoshop?
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IBM could have "encrypted" their BIOS (double ROT13 anyone :-) and we'd all be using either $3000 486s, Macs, or some random brand of computer, each one of which would be massively expensive and require its own OS and software...
You could only watch television on an "approved" set, simply receiving a signal would be considered dangerous "piracy" and against the law. Oh, wait, it already is that way with satellite transmissions...
Taking apart your digital clock to scavenge the LCD for another proejct would be illegal as the circuit paths to activate the crystals are a content protection device.
Prescriptions drugs would be insanely expensive, as it would be illegal to reverse engineer a competitior's formula after the patent runs out (okay, so it's not digital, but if we're talking about reverse engineering in general).
Nobody would have ever heard of a little company called Microsoft. If not for the popularity of of clone PCs Windows probably would have never caught on.
The Internet? Forget it.
I know I am preaching to the choir here, but its not reverse engineers that create problems. Most software vendors, when confronted with a very big problem in software, will deny it completely -- even to the point of leaving their customers vulnerable.
I like how Weld put it:
"The only way the public finds out about most privacy or security problems is from the free public disclosures of individuals and organizations. "
The release of vulnerabilities will not cause more computer crime, but rather, it would prompt the software designers to fix and make the software MORE secure. That, and it may alert customers to software designers who might be thinking with profit in mind (in contrast to their customers security)
If anyone wants to read more about Weld Pond check out http://www.l0pht.com/~weld/index.html.
Well, it's time to MAKE them care, by making them aware of the impact that the DMCA will have on their lives. It might turn out that Joe Sixpack downloads his favorite Elvis Costello tunes from Napster because his LP's are scratched beyond recognition. And what if he wanted to get DVD soon, but didn't want to worry about the MPAA charging him a flat rate to play the movie? Then he should start caring about how the DMCA will affect his life.
One of the major reasons why I hate the DMCA is because of how it became law: a joint venture between the MPAA, RIAA, and the government. In no way was this act approved by the US citizens. The very fact that the DMCA will become law soon flies in the face of this passage of the Declaration of Independence:
From the consent of governed. Now, did we give any consent to have the DMCA passed into law? NO. Were any referendums held to study public opinion on this issue? NO.
The DMCA IS destructive of the ends established in the Declaration, and it is our right to abolish the DMCA. It is not only our right, but now it is our responsibility to eliminate the DMCA. The DMCA will affect our happiness in the future; we will become drones, being forced by the MPAA to shell out X amount of dollars to watch a pre-recorded movie for Y amount of time. Even worse, the RIAA might soon mandate that we pay for FM radio by the minute. I fear that this idea (or a similar incarnation) isn't far off.
Do I sound a little like Henry David Thoreau? Good! It's nice to know that I'm one of the only remaining Transcendentalists in the US.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Think about, they could rapid oil change places, repair shops, chiltons, haynes, and body shops all out of business within a few years. The real fun would begin when people would realize that they no longer have the right of first sale. That's right, that brand new car you just bought can't be given away, but your allowed to trade it in for a $1,500 discount. Ala AT&T, gas stations would have to pay money to auto manufactures for a /right/ to sell gas for their cars. And the thing that they would love the most, popping the hood of your car could void your warranty. After-all, no one other than the dealer needs to look inside there, right?
I bet ZDNet wouldn't have ran it if they had been giving out CueCats.
It's still nice to see a mainstream computer site getting the issues around reverse engineering right. Most of the time they seem to accuse hackers of breaking protections, and reverse engineering for piracy. Here they were highlighting the good points. Privacy, security and interoprability are all good reasons that reverse engineering should be important to us all.
If I buy something I want to own it not lisence it. If I take it apart to see how it works that is my right.
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
Is it just me, or are all those italicized, bolded words in the the posting, blurry to anyone else?
Or are my retinas starting to detach?
The article makes good mention of the link between security and openness. I have to say, I haven't always been a big fan of announcing security holes in software. I was a student at CMU at the time SATAN was released several years back. At the time, I and several others wondered what the heck the folks at CERT (some of whom I knew) were doing. In retrospect, of course, it was one of the most constructive tools ever created for increasing system security. So when CERT announced they were no longer going to arbitrarily delay their announcements of new security holes, I cheered.
Which is all to say that the more tools there are for opening up software and exposing those security holes, the better it will be for everyone. Goodness knows that full discovery and disclosure can make software vendors jump higher and faster than they ever would normally. Remember the big read-anyone's-Hotmail fiasco last year? Man that made the rounds fast - and so did the fix, within a day. How many Microsoft problems can you say that about?
So here's to reverse engineering - DMCA be damned. Keep on peeking and poking.
Among the findings, are results that opoint to the fact that Post lied on the RDA label, and in fact if you dig depper are including small amounts of addictive chemicals designed to make you crave more of their foods.
enter the DMCA, before this information could be readily studied, Post Cereal Inc. issued a cease and desist letter based on the fact that this information is protected by a weak cryptography (the glue holding the box shut).
See how insane this is? This is what corporations want, a way into your lives to monitor and control what you do, see, buy, think, and say. Unfortunately things like the DMCA make it even easier.
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Say, invalidation of the underlying IP and reimbursement of the wronged party's legal costs, lost time, etc. Tarring and feathering might be a bit much. Make it optional, with a special jury determination on the question.
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When the Altair originally succeeded companies such as Proc Tech reverse engineered the bus and made add on boards. MITS called these companies "parasites" but ther were actually adding value to the product and helped it succeed.
When the IBM PC came out it was pretty much open apart from the BIOS. Even before Compaq reversed engineered it there were heaps of 3rd party add-ons that make the product more attractive to buyers.
Contrast that to the Mac which was closed in every regard, you had virtually one source for add-on's, Apple. The Mac was at a severe disadvantage even before the PC Clone market go going because there were so many people creating extra value for PC's.
Companies hate reverse engineering because they have delusiuons of grandure. They believe that they will be able to predict every possible use for their product AND be able to supply the demand for those products.
The long term fortunes of businesses that take the "reverse-engineering-bad" mentality follows a pretty similar path.
When it absolutely positively has to be there.
There are number of people who just do not understand everything that we do. These common folk would just say that what we're doing is piracy and stealing.
The easiest way to explain the situation to them is to have them imagine that the hood of their car was welded shut and the bottom was completely covered. Would they be pirates for trying to change their oil? Or see what was causing the blue smoke? No! And people would never allow this to happen.
This is why they need to be told. We can bitch amongst ourselves all we want, but if the people who don't program don't understand the problem then it will never be solved. Legislation isn't moved by experts. It's moved by a lot of the little guys getting indignant.
So... Anyone up up for another viral hoax like the "pay per email thing"???
Posted by DRAGONWEEZEL@HOTMAIL:
Reverse engineering is instinct in most children. Remember when you were two and all you ever did was ask WHY? Once you knew what why meant, You asked it till you were blue in the face. REMEMBER?? I KNOW YOU DO!! I personally remember reverse engineering some kewl toys I had. I.E. remote/radio controled vehicles, my bicycle, fire, the toilet, and a feeble atempt to recreate the cooking of popcorn (when I was three). my point here is not only is reverse engineering something that may help our society, it is instinctive to human nature to do so. dw Fire is red,violets are blue I am a schitzophranic, so am I.
Suppose all reverse engineering were outlawed.
This means that unless an individual already works for a company, the only things he can learn about are the things that have been voluntarily released to the public. Companies rarely, if ever, release detailed information about their technologies, even if those technologies are obsolete, because new spins on those old techniques may give the company a competitive edge.
So where does this leave the individual? The only thing left for him to learn is old and outdated. And over time, the material available for him to learn will get older and older.
Which can only mean that the pace of innovation will slow to a crawl, because most innovation stands on top of prior innovation.
This may be the strongest overall argument in favor of reverse engineering and public disclosure of the results.
--
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
this was not flame. it is true. Reverse engineering is a fact of life. There is no way to get around it. Most programs for Linux are created from reverse engineering, almost all IBM compatibles were reverse engineered...
- Bill
When Big Companies do it it is easier for them to get away with it. Why they have lawyers and a staff to back them up.
When individuals they get sued and have very few choices of action to take. The irony of it all.
If Compaq hadn't reverse engineered the PC, we'd all still be using $4000 IBMs, which might not be faster than a 386. The ability and right to reverse engineer is absolutely necessary. Without it, the economy would *really* be dominated by stone-age monopolies, and there would be no innovation. Proprietary locks are nothing but economic logjams. They prevent people with even better ideas from taking things to the next level, and continuing to create and add value.
Also i ask as a question which is more illegal: If a company A, releases a device D (like the CueCat), and A says that they are not collecting information, that the device D has no way of identifying someone &tc, if a person P, reverse engineers D, does only P get into trouble, is there no accountablility for A, which lied to the public?
This has been an issue for a long time in the United States. The laws basically say that if something is investigated illegally, it can't be used in court and therefore in your semi-hypothetical situation the company does not get in trouble. This is actually intended to protect the citizens from the government, but in this situation you no longer have the citizens being protected. Obviously, something needs to be reevaluated.
It is clear that half the regulation either hasn't caught up with the digital age and the other half has been subverted by the companies taking advantage of us. Does anyone know of plans to challenge the DMCA in court? I know a number of organizations that are probably doing this but haven't seen an organized effort (mostly due to my own ignorance).
The world needs dynamite too; but that doesn't mean it ought to be available to just anyone on a whim as some so-called "right".
Any activity, no matter how useful, must be tightly controlled if it has the potential to cause great harm to others. Thousands of employees paychecks and hundreds of thousands of shareholders may well depend on some trade secret or copyrighted function. I'm sorry, but you have no "right" to steal that from them in the name of OSS or whatever golden idol you worship.
Like other engineering disciplinies, reverse engineering (and also programmers developping for life critical components) needs to be licensed by a regulatory body after the applicant applies for and passes a rigorous test. Once he passes he is granted the privelege of practicing reverse engineering under a code of ethics that among other things requires him not to disclose proprietary or trade secrets that may result in harm to others. Violators will have their licenses revoked with stiff fines for illegal practice. In secirity testing, vulnerabilities need to be address and corrected before being revealed to the general public. Issues of interoperability are issues for the people trying to make their components work with one another's and is no one elses business.
Reverse engineering should not be not a right, but a privelege instead.
"Why the World Needs Reverse-Engineering"
The World has Reverse Engineering, you seem to have confused "USA", the wonderful birthplace of such great things as the DMCA, with the term "WORLD", refering to the rest of the world, where we can do such things as use the international encryption libraries for Canadian OpenBSD project.
*snicker* *snicker* *hmpf*
/nutt
Click here for the details. Was it this?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
It was Pheonix.
Mike
Now, everyone is able to see exactly how it works! All of your hard work, and it is suddenly ripped away from you as clones pop up everywhere!
The original intent of patent law was to promote innovation by rewarding innovators. As with many other things however, it is now taken advantage of by non-innovating profit seekers.
I completely agree with the idea that something I create should be protected if I want it to be. I worked hard at it and deserve a reward. I don't think though, that it should be completely closed. Anyone who wants to should be able to look around and see what I did and how I did it. As long as the law says that they can't sell a clone of it. I don't really mind if they get inspiration for their own innovation though. We all stand on the shoulders of giants (paraphrase of Newton). This is the way progress works. The time limit on a patent is a very good idea. I'm not sure exactly how long it is though. Should be shorter probably, now that everything moves so quickly on the internet.
Don't laugh. It is already forbidden for CA residents to tinker with their newer lawn mower engines. Access is protected by a seal that is illegal for all but authorized service personnel to remove! Don't think CA legislators aren't already at looking to do the same with cars down the line!
Very true! If Compaq wasn't able to reverse engineer the IBM BIOS we would all be screwed as far as PC's go. But on the bright side there would be no Micro$oft;-)
A few hours grace before the madness begins again.
Patent law does exactly what 'b0rxus' does-- when you file a patent, you release all of the details of your system to the public, and your plans become a publicly available government document, accessible by anyone.
The trade-off is that the government gives you a 17-year monopoly on the use of this patent, enforceable by law.
On the other hand, if your system is an unpatented trade secret, then reverse engineering is free game-- if you didn't protect your "trade secret" well enough, then you deserve to lose it.
-Dean
Beta tetsters do this for many products already, we just don't hear as much about it. (Think NDA, et. al.)
Yes...I am a rocket scientist.
I don't like the somewhat random usage of the bold tag in this article
I'm a reverse engineer. The very first contract job I did when I started my new consulting business was to reverse engineer the file format for a project management database used by the motion picture industry.
My client, Graphical Planet, wanted to make a product that would interoperate with Movie Magic Scheduling. Only the Movie Magic publishers wouldn't tell them how, and in fact were quite unfriendly towards them.
We initially agreed that I would complete the reverse engineering in a week and be paid $1500.
It actually took me three weeks, and was some of the most difficult work I have done as a programmer - while it was interesting, it was mentally painful, like cracking an enemy code. Perhaps what made it worse was that I desperately needed the money and only would get paid if I succeeded.
In the end I was able to write up a detailed file format specification document, and I also wrote a C program that would dump the contents of a MM project file into a human-readable text file. I successfully tested it by dumping out the full project file from an actual full-length motion picture.
How did I do it? I created lots of little sample files, for example, my first document I added only the letter "A" in one field, then made a second, where I changed that to the letter "B". I made hex dumps of the files and then compared the hex dumps. A lot of the work went into trying to find the best kind of files to make for my testing.
I want to point out that, until the DMCA reverse engineering was always perfectly legal in the US, and in fact state trade secret protection laws specifically grant reverse engineering an exemption from trade secret protections.
Even now, most things are still legal to reverse engineer, and I think it is likely that the DMCA will be found unconstitutional - or some applications of it will be, for example the Content Scrambling System is clearly a violation of well-established antitrust laws.
One of the reasons that reverse engineering is legally protected, I understand, is that it is not the public's objective that novel inventions be kept secret.
What the government would prefer a company do if it wants to have a monopoly over an invention is to apply for a patent, because part of the patent application is a full disclosure of the invention (sufficiently detailed that some one expert in the art could reproduce it), and then the monopoly is granted for a limited time.
Twenty years may seem like forever in high-tech, but keep in mind that the monopoly does eventually come to an end. This is why we have generic drugs, for example, and also not that the patent on RSA public key cryptography, the basis of PGP encryption and the SSL or secure socket layer, used for https secure web pages, expired in September of this year.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
I hate to play the devil's advocate, but can't anybody out there see why these companies don't want their products reverse engineered? In the grand scheme of things, it's only ever about money. If someone else knows how their product works, and compete with them (or deny them revenue streams as in the case of CueCat), these companies lose money. I agree, however, that reverse engineering is important and is in the end benefical to the consumer. But that does not mean that we have to attack companies that are trying to defend their business interests. Remember, the bottom line here is that all companies are in the business of making money, not in providing perfect service to consumers, as much as we want them to. Anyways, I just thought I'd present my point of view, and will probably be labled flamebait.. oh well, doesn't life just suck.
Polluting the Internet since 2003...
http://percep
Think about that. There are now black boxes, whether in hardware or software, that are illegal to peek inside. You can pay for it and use it, but you are not allowed to open up the hood. You cannot look to see if the box violates your privacy or has a security vulnerability that puts you at risk.
This sums up the article. Fsck the MPAA. Fsck DC, and while I'm at it, fsck anyone who dares to take away our rights to reverse engineering.
Now IANAL, but I suspect that *ue*at just didn't invoke the DMCA properly, or did so poorly:
Sec 1201 (i) Protection of Personally Identifying Information. -
(1) Circumvention permitted. - Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), it is not a violation of that subsection for a person to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title, if -
(A) the technological measure, or the work it protects, contains the capability of collecting or disseminating personally identifying information reflecting the online activities of a natural person who seeks to gain access to the work protected;
(B) in the normal course of its operation, the technological measure, or the work it protects, collects or disseminates personally identifying information about the person who seeks to gain access to the work protected, without providing conspicuous notice of such collection or dissemination to such person, and without providing such person with the capability to prevent or restrict such collection or issemination;
(C) the act of circumvention has the sole effect of identifying and disabling the capability described in subparagraph (A), and has no other effect on the ability of any person to gain access to any work; and
(D) the act of circumvention is carried out solely for the purpose of preventing the collection or dissemination of personally identifying information about a natural person who seeks to gain access to the work protected, and is not in violation of any other law.
(i)(1)(B) Likely is a killer -- too many "ands" in there, and a EULA might be considered "conspicuous" even if no one reads it. But conspicuous sounds like a nice word that lawyers can around play with.
Note that this *only* means that one *single* company just hasn't used the DMCA properly -- yet. One minor change to their software, and the lawsuit floodgates can open against their new(er) users. Don't expect anyone else to make this mistake.
I just wish the DMCA let people other than just the Librarian of Congress decide what "classes of works" didn't fall under it. To me, DVDs from other regions fall under the area of items were are "severerly restricted" from using -- I prefer European and Asian content over most American works.
Wow.. you learn a little something every day.
I initially thought Cue Cat was some sort of fancy vibrator. Amazing the things you can learn reading
I imagine it could still be hacked to scan for signs of cervical cancer and take you to the AMA website if any abnormalities popped up.
Those companies/people who are seeking to ban reverse engineering are looking for self-destruction. If reverse engineering is banned, they can't reverse engineered their competitors products too. Are they too stupid to see that? Or are they having the illusion that their product will always stay the best and all the innovations are coming from them? Wouldn't new startups with innovative products benefit then? Or the large corporations are already lobbying for laws or coming up with means (think m$) that would squash small startups with innovative products into oblivion?
Emerson just talked about the transcendental philosophy. Thoreau actually acted upon those ideals.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
It suddenly occurred to me that most of physics is based on reverse-engineering the universe. Everything from the experimental method to atom-smashers.
Where would we be if the creator of that universe had issued a decree that dis-allowed reverse engineering?
-Eldurbarn
That kind of product will open an opportunity for a competitor whose products are not as well protected. It's the same as one of the arguments for open source software: it isn't practical for most users to reverse engineer closed-source software to fix bugs in it or otherwise understand its workings. Very few highly successful products can thrive without a third-party/aftermarket, and the ability to reverse engineer to various degrees is one of the things that allows a 3rd party market to function. Companies that try to close their products entirely may find their lunch being eaten by others who are less paranoid.
Ed
1. I don't think that any scientific research exists, which does NOT represent some sort of reverse engineering. And since we are not in the dark ages, we can expect our governments and laws to protect us from "closed science", "alchemy", "voodoo"-medicine", "black boxes", "ufo-prophets" and some "digital hokuspokus" in form of "cute cats".
2. Patents, as mentioned above, are supposed to protect an inventor's R&D investment and profits for a reasonable time AND make his invention PUBLIC, revealing to anyone WHAT he has found and HOW he solved a problem. The intention of this second part of the patent law was to increase the public's knowledlge for the good of society in a way that further research could build upon previous inventions.
3. This second part of the patenting deal is the one which is screwed up completely, when dealing with patents of business methods of software programs. It doesn't work for software, because you don't REVEAL the EXACT CODE to the public, just the idea of what the program does, which is rarely a unique patentable idea in the first place.
4. The only thing which would come close to revealing the "invention" to the public with regard to software, would be to open up the source code.
5. Conclusion is that receiving a patent for a software program's business process protects the inventor's idea and profits ON THE COST of the public's interest and decreases further innovation for the society's good.
So, it's a process gone mad, which actually is to the disadvantage of society and leads to the people's dependency of closed technological procedures in massive ways.
I wonder why the software industry is allowed to enjoy these kind of priviledges other scientific disciplines would not even dare to dream of.
First of all, the Declaration of Independence has absolutely zero legal standing in this country. That was a CONSCIOUS DECISION by the Founding Fathers. It may make nice rhetoric but it really has very little bearing on the day to day in America.
Now, did we give any consent to have the DMCA passed into law?
You really just completely and utterly fail to understand how a republic works, don't you?
Freshly out of school, my first job as a programmer required me to reverse engineer a proprietory database, because the vendor went under. The company I was working for has thousands and thousands of customer info, contact info, and tons of othe stuff in that database.
The trouble was that the db does not provide any API or tools whatsoever to retrieve the information, except browsing thru its own interface. It certainly was not very convenient to enter by hand all the entries to another db.
As a test to see how well I could do my work while I was still in probation period, I was asked to figure out the file format of the database, and retrieve the whole contents and feed them into another database system.
So, in this case, reverse engineering is a necessity. And I'm sure that some software vendors will go under too in the future. If that happens, what would you do, if the law says you can't reverse engineer?
Anyone interested in Economics will tell you that end-users screwing with products is bad. Now, as a n economist and a hacker my two paths diverge. I think that if a free piece of equipment is released to the public, it cannot be considered an economic scarcity, (laymen defined as "if something was free of charge, and there'd be none left after 5 minutes, it's an econmic scarcity");
Anyways, So they release this product to the public, planning on increasing popularity and (factors of demand) of another product (Database registration). So basically if enough users get cuecats, then there's a huge market for cuecat licesences from other businesses. Now that DigitalConvergence has a potential strangle hold...
Back to the hacking =)
It is true that if a product is hacked then it thrives new tests which makes the product run better. However, if it is in the hands of the consumer (wether they are paying for it or not), this can turn ugly. Websites popup with FAQs on extracting features, etc.
So lets bring these two sections together.
So you (say you're DigitalConvergence) have an investment in a popularity inducing object (said Cuecat). A website all of a sudden pops up providing obsolescence and alternatives/substitutions to you're product. Now if this were another company DC would either buy them, or succum to the "competitve market"...
But NO, It's a Flyingbuttmonkey with a plan. This buttmonkey wants to exploit your product, making you lose millions.
So look at it this way...
1) A company can continue with a cheapo investment.
2) The company must sucuum to people hacking their free of charge product.
Economically speaking, the hacking is a market sucess, however a product failure... So the end-user lucks out, and the product fails.
This would be good (non-economically) only if another alternative came about (not based on exploitation).
http://siokaos.org/
I thought prescription drugs were insanely expensive... Isn't that why American seniors in northern states take bus trips up here to Canada? I was reading some of the comparisons in today's paper... some people are saving >90% by crossing the border...
Intolerant people should be shot.
If you write a program and give it away with source, and it infringes some patent or copyright, and yet there is no malicious intent, then at worst you will be forced to withdraw the free program. If you write a commercial program, though, and it infringes a patent or copyright, then you may have to fork over several times the amount of money you made from the program. Current patent laws make it possible to patent almost anything, and almost impossible to tell in advance whether you are going to infringe somebody's patent. (Copyright is more generous because you have to practically plagiarize someone's code to get sued over it, if you're a developer.) So, it makes sense, if you want to keep your money, to conceal your source code, because then litigious patent-owners won't be able to tell whether their patents are being infringed -- unless they can find the results of some reverse engineering.
"Originality is the art of concealing your sources..." or am I just being cynical?
It is a bad business strategy to give away a free product and then expect customers not to take full advantage of it. That's almost as bad as basing your whole business on the hope that Microsoft will license you their latest source code every single year for as long as you run your business. Isn't it funny how some so-called businessmen are so eager to sue people for defying their expectations, when the problem is with their own lack of foresight? If you expect somebody to do only certain things, you'd better get it in writing (i.e., by signing a contract with them where they agree to do only those certain things.) If you don't have a contract, you don't have a guarantee, and it's your job as a businessman to consider what other people and other companies are within their rights to do -- and you must plan accordingly.
When businessmen and investors make bad decisions, they destroy wealth -- hopefully only their own. If the effect is localized that way, then the effect on the economy, though negative, is minimized. Hopefully people will learn to make better decisions. It's an expensive lesson, but it should be learned: If you give something away for free, people will take it.
-- An Ayn-onymous Coward
Also i ask as a question which is more illegal: If a company A, releases a device D (like the CueCat), and A says that they are not collecting information, that the device D has no way of identifying someone &tc, if a person P, reverse engineers D, does only P get into trouble, is there no accountablility for A, which lied to the public? This has been an issue for a long time in the United States. The laws basically say that if something is investigated illegally, it can't be used in court and therefore in your semi-hypothetical situation the company does not get in trouble. This is actually intended to protect the citizens from the government, but in this situation you no longer have the citizens being protected. Obviously, something needs to be reevaluated. Let's add something: The Cuecat sent its serial through with the swipe, and this could be determined with Notepad. Now, if installed, this could not really be a violation of hardware integrity because you are using your wetware and trial-and-error to figure out, hey, this does something different from the first one I used. And PS: In order to prove evidence is illegal, the burden is on the opposition to prove it was illegal, and not the provider to prove it was. It is clear that half the regulation either hasn't caught up with the digital age and the other half has been subverted by the companies taking advantage of us. Does anyone know of plans to challenge the DMCA in court? I know a number of organizations that are probably doing this but haven't seen an organized effort (mostly due to my own ignorance). I am hereby stating that I am going to run for Congress in 2004, when I will be (just barely!) legal age. We need more hackers to be in office, and remember: Spread information far and wide to those who will hear. The most important duty of a citizen is to be involved in the political affairs of his State.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
I don't think the Slashdot community needs to be told the benefits of reverse engineering. But, what I do think people need to know is how to put their ideas into action and get results. Does the public have what it takes to make a turn-around and put the courts on our side? Voting is just a start. These companies that we all are so mad at for limiting our rights had the motivation to get things done. The pitched, they lobbied, they did what it took. They saw possibility of a short-term financial gain and seized it. /., and all the techs, geeks, engineers etc. to be heard.
I believe that you don't need a fancy suit and a wad of cash to have your way. It's time for all the people on irc, Usenet,
It's obvious that we do not have the voice like other groups do when it comes to getting our ideas across to our legislature. Does anyone know why? Are we that small a group? Of the people I've meet some have been disenchanted with the system and believe it can't help them no matter what. Others think that a more open environment somehow contradicts our capitalist society. Still, others simply don't care; as long as they get their paycheck, everything is fine. How can we try to change these attitudes?
--
Excuse me, but please read his post again. You don't seem to know what *he* was talking about. The point is that IBM could have but they didn't. Hence the clones and the standards and the oh so cheap hardware leading to Beowulf clusters :-)
Yes, the corporations in conjunction with their buyout of congress has led to a sad situation indeed. Reverse engingeering, and I don't think I need to cite the many obvious examples here, is necessary for the forward movement of mankind and technology. Should the govt/corporate America decide, via DMCA or otherwise, to limit our ability to do this, technology will suffer. Not because people will stop hacking, but because derivative works will become illegal.
And this is a sad fact indeed. As an American I can only shake my head in disgust at what the MPAA has done in their arrest of Johanson. The US is losing all respect for another country's sovereignty. The MPAA is in bed with government and this makes my head spin. The thought that they can go into another country and arrest a non-US citizen is truly amazing. As far as I know, the DMCA is not internationally applicable - yet anyway. This is an American law and had Johanson lived in the US, this would be a different story. The US govt/mpaa trying to enforce our laws beyond our borders is complete bullshit!!!!
How is this any different from an Indian Salman Rushdie getting official death threats from the Iranian government because his book somehow insults Islam. Another country trying to export its laws.
The US has become to imperialist in nature. Another example of this would be the Helms-Burton Act. The HBA allows US companies to sue foreign companies that trade with Cuba. They justify this on the basis that these companies are dealing with property nationalized by Fidel Castro which once belonged to American companies. Opponents to the HBA point out that the US is trying to make/impose its own restrictions on foreign businesses, a policy highly resented throughout the world.
There are many other amazing things the US can do but many others that it can't.(or would rather simply ignore) For example, college students are tricked into vacationing to Nicarauga and when leaving, tricked into carrying cocaine out. These young students are then caught by Nicaraugan officials and held in the most deplorable of conditions, yet the US govt. says they can do nothing. They do nothing because only a persons life is at stake and not the psycho-somatic welfare of a corporation. How nice, as an American I can be assured that my country will do nothing to protect me outside it's borders. Yet, I am assured that foreigners outside of these borders are not immune to US laws. This spells hypocrisy.
The US helped the poor Kuwaiti's because of their oil and nothing more.... Bush sr. claimed to be doing this because of human righs.... yea right! Millions of Bosnians were imprisioned and treated not much differently than Jews in Nazi Germany and the US considers this an internal conflict and decides not to interfere. Translation - there is no oil in Bosnia, therefore we will have no economic benefits in freeing a suppressed people.
The DMCA, UCITA, Helms-Burton Act, and many others are clearly acts to put American corporations in more control. It's about control, control, and even more control. It's about their pocketbooks and strongarming anybody who gets in the way.
I think it would be helpful to have a central website devoted to reverse engineering tools, as well as archives of legal documents, tracking reverse engineering news developments, discussion forums for trading tips and so on.
Anyone want to set one up? I don't really have the time right now but I could contribute expertise and code.
What would be a good domain name?
Or are there any sites like this already? Certainly there must be sites that contain bits of what I propose - but what about a full-fledged reverse engineering archive and portal.
Better not physically locate it in the US!
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Hi
OK, I know that software isn't like a car, but i find it disturbing that companies are trying to make it illegal to reverse-engineer their products, while the first thing competing companies in the car business do when for example Ford releases a new car, is buying like 12 cars of the new model, driving them around, and totally take them apart and re-assemble them again!
Reverse-engineering is something that every company uses, hi-tech or not, so why would it be illegal in the software business?
http://www.zd net .com/tlkbck/comment/22/0,7056,99112-589101,00.html
Apparently the DMCA itself requires that notifications of violations of the DMCA must be made in writing with a "wet" signature, that is actually written by hand with ink. Email and fax is insufficient.
The fellow suggests that you post the following on your site as a legal notice to those who may attempt to contact you about material on your site that they claim infringes their copyright:
Procedure for Notifying Yourname.com of Copyright Infringement Claims
In accordance with the DMCA, copyright owners, or persons authorized to act on behalf of owners who believe specific Shared Content may infringe any exclusive right(s) of the copyright owner should notify Yourname.com's designated agent in the following manner:
Notices Must Be in Writing: Yourname.com must obtain all required information in writing in the form of a 'Notice of Copyright Infringement' ("Notice"). Telephonic, verbal or other non-written communications are insufficient under Yourname.com's policies and do not meet the requirements of the DMCA.
Content of Notice: Notice to Yourname.com must include the following information:
1. Identification of the copyrighted work that You claim has been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works are covered in the Notice, a representative list of the copyrighted works that You claim have been infringed using Yourname.com's services; 2. Identification of Shared Content, material or activity that You claim is infringing, that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled. Such identification must contain information sufficient to permit Yourname.com to locate that Shared Content; 3. Your street and mailing address, telephone number and, if available, Your electronic mail address; 4. A statement by You that You have a good faith belief that the disputed use of the copyrighted material is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law (e.g., fair use); 5. A statement by You, made under penalty of perjury, that all the information in Your Notice is accurate and that You are the copyright owner, or authorized to act on behalf of an owner of any exclusive right that is allegedly infringed by the materials referenced in Your Notice.
Notices Must be Signed: The written notice must be subscribed with the "wet signature" (no facsimiles, proxies or copies) of the copyright owner or of a person authorized to act on behalf of an owner of any exclusive right(s) that are allegedly infringed by the materials referenced in the Notice.
Delivery to Designated Agent: The Notice must be addressed and delivered via U.S. Mail, Express Mail, or Courier to Yourname.com's Designated Copyright Agent, as follows:
Copyright Agent
Yourname.com
Your Blvd
Your Town, State Zip Code
Your Phone Number
If You suspect specific Shared Content may constitute copyright infringement, but are not the copyright owner or authorized to act on behalf of an owner of any exclusive right(s) that You believe may be infringed, please notify Yourname.com at legal@Yourname.com. If You are not the copyright owner or the owner's representative, Yourname.com may not be able to remove the Shared Content. Yourname.com will attempt to investigate each report and forward each notice to the appropriate copyright owner, if identified.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Preparing diagrams and other non-text, and non-code specifications and gradually shifting to code is understood to be the way to go and proper engineering. Code generators are meant to automate this process. Non-code notations, however, have no prospects to develop into definitive, catch-all specifications, which then could be converted into a secodary derivative, the code. Programming languages have much better prospects to have specifications embedded. Eiffel with its Design by Contract and other features has already gone a long way in this direction. So the code is the definitive source, allowing automated extraction of specifications and various descriptive materials. Software engineering is (going to be) reverse.
A decade ago, 'reverse engineering' was known as 'cracking.' It was a semi-noble endeavor by people to defeat ridiculous copy protection schemes.
No, a decade ago 'cracking' was called 'cracking' and 'reverse engineering' was exactly that. Cracking only uses some of the methods of reverse engineering to a copy-protection scheme, then applies a transformation to that scheme to disable it. If the same scheme is used in another product, the same transformation can be applied with no reverse engineering required.
Working out the Microsoft Word file format is not 'cracking' - removing the need for a serial number in WORD.EXE is.
Does my bum look big in this?
87
But I see no traffic on eth0.
Anyone interested in Economics will tell you that end-users screwing with products is bad. Now, as a n economist and a hacker my two paths diverge. I think that if a free piece of equipment is released to the public, it cannot be considered an economic scarcity, (laymen defined as "if something was free of charge, and there'd be none left after 5 minutes, it's an econmic scarcity");
Anyways, So they release this product to the public, planning on increasing popularity and (factors of demand) of another product (Database registration). So basically if enough users get cuecats, then there's a huge market for cuecat licesences from other businesses. Now that DigitalConvergence has a potential strangle hold...
Back to the hacking =)
It is true that if a product is hacked then it thrives new tests which makes the product run better. However, if it is in the hands of the consumer (wether they are paying for it or not), this can turn ugly. Websites popup with FAQs on extracting features, etc.
So lets bring these two sections together.
So you (say you're DigitalConvergence) have an investment in a popularity inducing object (said Cuecat). A website all of a sudden pops up providing obsolescence and alternatives/substitutions to you're product. Now if this were another company DC would either buy them, or succum to the "competitve market"...
But NO, It's a Flyingbuttmonkey with a plan. This buttmonkey wants to exploit your product, making you lose millions.
So look at it this way...
1) A company can continue with a cheapo investment.
2) The company must sucuum to people hacking their free of charge product.
Economically speaking, the hacking is a market sucess, however a product failure... So the end-user lucks out, and the product fails.
This would be good (non-economically) only if another alternative came about (not based on exploitation).
Moderators: Look lightly upon my post and I shall reward you with an MD5 of PI.
http://siokaos.org/
If a company makes a product and then writes software for only one platform, people can reverse engineer it and make it avialable for other platforms thus meaning people who could not buy it before can now buy it and so the company will make more money.
Also, I might be considered a Transcendentalist hybrid, since I'm so engaged in the news. If Thoreau was alive now, he'd be an avid Slashdot member for sure. He'd have opinions on the DMCA, the DeCSS issue, Microsoft's sales practices, and so on.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
By letting the greedy outlaw reverse engineering, is the US slitting its own throat?
The laws if the United States stop at the border. ALL of the imported goods, by definition, come from outside of the border.
The trend to employing manual labor "off shore" outside the borders, has been rampant for decades and industries are running out of things to shift offshore.
The use of H1-B visa's is plundering the high-tech workers from the very shores that are being exploited for manual labor. Their use is accelerating rather than being balanced through any attempt at educating the US populace.
But H1-B visa holders are treated like indentured slaves and sent packing at every corporate down-turn. They leave taking their knowledge extra territorially where the opportunities may be less but the stability is greater.
The DMCA applies ONLY to within the borders of the United States. The H1-B "deportees" are intelligent enough to reverse engineer solutions without concerning themselves with the stupidity hatched by the RIAA and the MPAA and other organizations which, in effect, produce nothing but law suits.
Is the United States going to end up on the short end of the stick for pursuing such short sighted policies?
As an H1-B worker myself, I don't give a rat's ass about the internal politics of the Unites States. If they wish to reduce themselves to ignorant groveling in front of imported television sets watching imported quality programs like those produced by the BBC or cheap home-made porn, so be it.
To paraphrase Newton (a Brit by the way:) "We see far because we stand on the shoulders of giants."
The DMCA is a great way to take the head from those shoulders and insure the giant doesn't bother anyone anymore. Its only a question of time.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
They are, at least new ones. My point is that they would be even MORE insanely expensive. When a company comes up with a new type of medication, they can get a patent on it (doesn't last as long as normal patents, less than 10 years if I remember right -- somebody help me out here). Once it runs out though, it can be cloned by every cheapo drug company in existence, hence the generic brands the store always offers you. That's why I can get a bottle of Deltasone (a Prednesone knockoff) with 50 tablets for around $8, but Singulair costs about $70 for the same amount.
And yes, it's true about people going to Canada to get prescription drugs, but that's a somewhat unrelated issue. That has to do with the fact that the Canadian government regulates the prices of prescriptions, where the US government has been bought by the pharmacutical companies.
[.sig not found; starting fs check]
You mean CLOSED-SOURCE developers, not commercial developers!
I know this is a rant, but for Christ's sake, THE OPPOSITE OF OPEN SOURCE IS CLOSED SOURCE. WHETHER SOMETHING IS OPEN OR CLOSED SOURCE HAS ABSOLUTELY NO BEARING ON WHETHER IT IS COMMERCIAL OR NOT!!!
* Debian's Linux distribution is open source and [AFAIK] non commerical [ie, it is produced for altruistic reasons].
* Red Hat's Linux distribution is open source and commercial, in that it is primarily produced for commercial benefit of Red Hat
* Winzip is a closed source commercial product. Its role in life is to generate revenue for Niko Mak Computing [also called the Winzip company].
* Parsec is a closed source non commerical product. It is also produced for altruistic reasons.
Why should we care that it's natural for a company to do X or Y, because it's only out to make money? It may be a scorpion's nature to sting--but does knowing that mean that we ought to go ahead and pet it anyway?
If corporations like DC can't help themselves when it comes to things like trying to bully reverse engineers (something I doubt, since there are other companies--also only interested in making money--who shrug off or even encourage reverse engineering), all the more reason that we should be wary of them and attempt to curb their abuses.
the site was originally starhack.ml.org. But like all good things on the net, 'life' intruded on the creator's part and he stopped being cool. bnetd was open source, but then someone came along and made it closed source, turned it into fsgs, and went above and beyond whatever bnetd did. fsgs.net, the only place to pick up a serious battle.net clone. bnetd just doesn't have it, never did, never will.
which is kinda disturbing when you think about it ^^;;
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Capitalism should not be a goal in itself; human (rights/happiness/freedom, call it what you will) should have a higher priority of governments. Capitalism is just a method, and without having laws for basic human liberties will turn democracy into bureaucratic fascism.
I couldn't care less whether 'the market moves forward' or not, I care whether humanity will move forward (I don't think it will, so at I hope it will move backwards as slow as possible).
With all this talk about the DMCA I'm reminded
of DeCSS. I know the DCMA is only for the US, but
is there a similiar law in Canada which also makes
DeCSS illegal in Canada as well?
Come see my website.
http://come.to/streiff
Consider this: I invent a perpetual motion machine. I sell it in a black box. Then somebody "reverse engineers" it. The information is now free, and demand drops considerably (as people build their own.) Now... is that disrespecting my life, as my income and quality of life drops? Is it disrespecting my liberty to sell however I please?
Consider this quote from the page you linked to: "(Rand presumably got royalties from the sale, and I'm sure it wasn't sold without her permission!)" But if someone duplicates Atlas Shrugged and sells copies, it _is_ sold without permission or payment! It is also not freedom of speech/press---Congress is making no law about who can print it. That's all the 1st Amendment covers... Congress making laws.
The whole anti-any-IP argument is flawed: it takes much less effort to copy than create. I favor _limited_ IP. Anyone can use it to preserve life; the monopoly disappears in 7 years; the granters must understand the device or be shown a working implementation (the inventor of the transformer was laughed out of the office for trying to patent a short circuit, because that's what the patent examiner saw it as. Soon after, the laws were reformed so the PE need not understand the device.)
-- LoonXTall
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
Note: This is not as refined and lucid as it should be, but it may still have a point. Just don't hold your breath.
Let me start off by saying to consider me any sort of enginneer would be laughable, so I may have this completely wrong.
While I read the posts made by people in this discussion, I tried to relate the idea to other forms of media.
Reverse engineering a program means pulling it apart to see how it works on the inside, but how would that translate with a movie, music, or book? To me it would seem that in these mediums reverse enginneering is quite common. You could deconstuct or analyze any of these and in the underlying basic "code" you would end up with a very general principal containing characters, plot, theme, etc.
As a wanna-be writer, I try and deconstuct everything I take in, be it the movie I watched last night, the book I was reading this morning, or the song I listened to on the way to work. I try and get a feel for what the artist is saying through their work. And sometimes you need more information then is placed directly in front of you order to do that. In order to see the larger picture of what is going on you may have to read between the lines a little. . .
Hell, one of the things that makes a piece of media meaningful to me is when I find it so profound and engaging that I start to wonder "how did they come to that conclusion?". I may even take it a step further and think: "what if this happened? What would the effect be then?"
To me, that directly correlates with what I believe is the basic purpose and goal of reverse engineering. Screwing around with things leads to a better understanding and somtimes a greater appreiciation of how things work. It also allows for greater innovation and improvement. If nobody understood the underlying principle of the wheel, would we as a species ever have progressed to where we are now?
The Entertainment industry does everything I do with movies, books, and music, only they even take it a step further. Heard any pop music that didn't sound like other pop music lately? Or watch a "blockbuster" summer disaster movie that was unlike any other? I swear, it seems like some of those flicks even use the same dog, which somehow always manages to make it to safety while other actual characters perish in patriotic, sacrificing, or possibly deserving ways.
I may not like how much of the movies, music, and books all end up feeling the same tired, cliche idea borrowed from other movies, music, and books. That doesn't make me file a lawsuit against anybody in the entertainment industry though.
If I remember correctly, the premise for "Survivor" was hardly original. Did the "oringal" creater of the idea recieve any royalty checks from the American Producers? Did he have his name in the end credits? Better yet: did they bother to even try sending a cease and decist letter upon hearing of the American "hack" of their idea?
This entire post may just be a mindless leap to the wrong conclusion, but I do believe it also goes some way in explaining why the acronyms of the month (MPAA/RIAA/DMCA/whatever) say lines of computer code differ from lines of other media in the fact they are not speech.
If they did treat it the same as other media, they would be far greater hypacrites then all of us that use the protocol of the month (Napster/Gnutella/HTTP) to fight the power in the name of the artist. Hell, they would be far greater pirates as well.
-------
If you actually had sufficient cerebral activity to read the site, you would have realized I didn't work for Mattel. I worked for a company that Mattel bought. That Mattel was using frivilous litigation (as the did with the CPHack case, and Aqua) to try to shut up critism.The abuse must be stopped!
Keep in mind, you may be the next person a large company may want to shut.
Fight Spammers!
How can the author forget the most import example of sucessful reverse engineer in the computer industry? The reverse engineering of the the IBM PC! A lot of people wouldn't have PC without that. It was the clones that drove down the prices initially. Without that MACs, Amigas, or any other expensive computer could have been the front runner, and with out the clones, some companies might still be in the darkages doing things the hard way because of cost. That was one of the most important events of the last millenium!!!
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Posted for your viewing pleasure: The Clause of the CueCat Legal Language Could Shut Down Hardware Tinkerers .
They SHOULD make it illegal, keeping things legal dilutes the pool of intelligent people working on it. Just think of how much technology gets done by small groups of people working on it than larger groups? Huge amounts of progress come from small groups of 5 people working on a project at a time, any more and you begin to lose efficencies. Besides keeping it underground draws people to something like a magnet. There should be whole websites on reverse engineering of devices like tivo, ipaq, etc. The more digital this world gets the more i love it because the more hackable it is. And from some of the posts ive seen i agree with such as id software utilizing the reverse engineering talent of the people on the net (or bbs's at the time) to make doom one of the most popular games of all time. Why dont other companies get a clue?
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
To a creationist, all investigation of the world (especially animal dissection) is a form of reverse-engineering.
But to non-creationists, such investigation is merely called "science", because the objects studied were not engineered to begin with, so there's nothing to reverse.
Therefore, I conclude from Sorehands dissection example, that he is from Kansas. ;-)
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I saw Soylent Green for the first time the other night, and it strikes me that the movie was a story about reverse-engineering.
If Thorne hadn't illegally entered the food-processing plant, and observed the manufacturing process (and killed two workers in the process), he would not have discovered that Soylent Green is people.
I believe that is all that needs to be said on this subject.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If GM were reverse-engineering Ford cars, they wouldn't be producing the utter crap they are now.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
DMCA is just the US law that implements the WIPO Copyright Treaty which the US is a signatory to. All other countries that as signatories have laws banning the reverse engineering of content protection mechanisms. Here is the list from www.wipo.org:
Argentina, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Monaco, Mongolia, Namibia, Netherlands, Nigeria, Panama, Portugal, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Senegal, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Togo, United Kingdom, United States of America, Uruguay, Venezuela, European Communities (51).
So if you live in one of these countries you cannot reverse engineer content protectionisms either.
-weld
We represent God and it has been brought to our attention that you have been attempting to reverse engineer his work.
You are hereby ordered to cease this immediately. If you continue with this action, we will bring legal action.
Please note, our client has never lost a case. Furthermore, he is the final judge in all matters in this universe.
Fight Spammers!
If you fight God in court, then he'll have to recuse himself on Judgement Day. The chances of Him being replaced by Mattel are vanishingly small.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Reverse engineering is taking all the information required to figure something out, and then figuring it out. This is not a metaphor, it's a literal definition. Under the DMCA and other laws that attempt to criminalize reverse engineering, you're allowed to have all the information you need to figure out how (for example) :CueCat works, you're just not allowed to actually figure it out. This scares me, because I'm a mathematician (in-training). The intellectual process of reverse engineering is logically equivalent to the intellectual process of doing theoretical mathematics.
You may say that allowing math research is beneficial to everybody, so nobody would want to illegalize it, but the same is true of reverse engineering, and allowing research into algebraic number theory (which I happen to be interested in) is NOT beneficial to the NSA, because they want a worldwide monopoly on any field of study related to cryptography. If the RIAA and MPAA can bully the government into passing the DMCA, think what the NSA can do.
Disclaimer: I know the above paragraph is an overly reactionary exaggeration, so please don't flame me. My point was not to suggest that math might someday be illegal (I'm NOT suggesting that), but rather to illustrate the absurdity of restricting reverse engineering by showing a more obviously absurd equivalent law.
The original Howling Frog is a fictional character and has no UID.