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Brief Analysis On Reverse Engineering Software
An unnamed correspondent writes: "
An article on PlanetIT.com discusses a court ruling that establishes the reverse-engineering of hardware and software as legal, under the "fair use" umbrella. What ramifications does this have in the industry? Can I reverse-engineer MS Word and write a word processor that can read and save .DOC files?" The article also asks the eternal burning question "Is the DMCA contradicting itself?" Though the court cases this piece deals with aren't new, the issues they deal with aren't going away, and it turns out that the Bleem and DeCSS cases may have more influence on other reverse engineering cases than anyone anticipated. Will sense chase out absurdity?
As far as I know yes ... ;)
I'm doing a lot a reverse engeneering and thats the reason why I asked a few lawyers about it allready
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
A simple way around EULAs - get your 3-year-old child, dog, or whatever to open the packaging or
click the "I accept" button.
Unless someone at the point of sale actually gets a signature from you that you have read, fully understand and accept the agreement (or unless you're stupid enough to send in such a signed agreement voluntarily), No-one can prove that you were ever aware of the EULA, let alone have read it or (shock, horror) actually agree to it.
In fact, if the software comes pre-installed, you can even reverse engineer it without anyone ever having to click on the "I accept" button.
--
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
If Sony had really thought it through, they would have released their OWN windoze app that ran PlayStation games. In addition, they should have given away development tools, and priced the emulator at something like $50 a shot. (Millions of emulators sold, millions of dollars received.) The pitch for the PlayStation hardware would be: "Hey, it's a whole lot cheaper than a PC, and it give better frame rates!"
This would vastly increase the number of users, make PlayStation a platform for computer games to be written on (gotta be better than the WIN32 API, right?), and get the next generation of game developers started on the Sony platform.
One lesson that Sony needs to learn from MicroSquish: the way to make the big bucks is to get the most users on the platform.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Some points everyone seems to be missing:
... when???
1. The original case was filed sometime in 1999
2. DMCA became law in
So the alleged infringements may have been committed before DMCA became law. If that's true (and assuming that the crazy US legal system doesn't allow retrospective laws to be enacted), this case will have little use as precedence for cases being prosecuted under DMCA.
--
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
If you look at the compatibility matrix, you'll find that it's mainly 2000 and 97 that they claim interoperate. But even if they actually interoperate, given Microsoft's history, most buyers I have talked to don't seem to assume that they have to upgrade to 2000 anyway in order to be able to read other people's files.
Sure, it's easy to beat: with a free database. There are several of them, and they work and scale a lot better than Access.
If I'm not mistaken, copyright lasts the duration of the creator's lifetime. Which isn't arbitrary
Well, we can try, now can't we?
New worlds are not born in the vacuum of abstract
New worlds are not born in the vacuum of abstract
ideas, but in the fight for daily bread --Rudolf Rocke
Anyway, it seems the 9th Circuit gets overturned all the time, so I wouldn't get too hopeful about this being a positive sign.
The case seemed like a fairly ideal one for SCOTUS to take, and they refused to hear it-- that seems like a very good sign, actually. It's certainly possible that they didn't feel like hearing any more cases in that term or somesuch, but they had to be conscious that by refusing to hear it, they significantly strengthened the 9th Circuit's ruling.
This was not a court ruling, but actual legislation.
The only issue of anonymous information is whether any of that may have come from people who have signed NDAs. Trade secrets are like patents (covering ideas) but with copyright style rules for when they apply (if you rediscover it, someone's trade secret doesn't apply).
Not quite, since the NDA only applies to the party who agreed to it in the first place. If they pass the information to a third party then that third party has done nothing wrong, since they were never a party to the agreement. Also the only protection a "trade secret" has is that it is a secret, if it becomes widely known then tough.
If I'm not mistaken, copyright lasts the duration of the creator's lifetime. Which isn't arbitrary.
How is this any less "arbitrary" than any other metric?
No. Adobe is an ethical company. Ever since the first version of Postscript (now is 3rd) all the documentation are public. You can download pdf files of Postscript Language Ref Manual and PDF Ref Manual and other good documentation for free (those books cost several dozen bucks if you buy the hardcopy version from Addison-Wesley, and they are exactly the print version of the pdfs). People have been generating postscript and pdf on-the-fly. You can output straight ps/pdf code (more involved but very flexible and powerful, especially .ps because it's not just a format but a full-blown lisp-like programming language). There are higher level free library such as pdflib with has C/C++/Java/Perl/Python binding. I have many half-a-page perl script that generate high quality graphical reports on the fly (I worked on genomics laboratory with robotics producing tons of data daily). The nice thing about PDF is that everybody can view them and always print true. It's also convenient to create hyperlinked PDF documents using pdflib.
-Marcel
(see my out-of-print book Undocumented Windows File Formats)
Amazon have it listed here. They reckon they can ship in 2-3 days.
Amazon's UK outfit can get it in 4-6 weeks
Funnily enough, Amazon in Germany can get it in 3-5 weeks.
Read what you want into that. I blame Frankfurt airport.
(Sorry for the repost formatting better)
Does this mean we can legally see BeOS work on Macs and Be has no real reason to bitch anymore about lawsuits from Apple?
What does this mean for open source stuff as well? Is it now legal to take the TNT drivers from windows and reverse engineer those and publish your results to make optimized drivers for other OSes (same goes with any driver that isn't already supported). I know this happens a lot already through things like bus sniffers, but now that we can just disassemble things for research, that could make a lot of things much much easier. Especially since those complex while loops that check certain hardware statuses will now become much easier to decode by looking at the source code instead of accesses.
What will this mean for internet game servers as well? Will things like the UO clients and server ports become entirely legal now so there is no grey area or possible lawsuits?
What about something like disassembling the various parts of QNX and rewriting it to make a free alternative to QNX that's improved and optimized for specific platforms. You could greatly improve things like diskaccess in it by removing the microkernel-ish features and all the message passing it does.
Perhaps this goes a bit left, and perhaps I am preaching to the choir. Technological secrets have only helped the power elite, the guys with the money. As a graduate student in an engineering discipline, I cannot tell you how many times I needed secret information to write a paper or complete a project. This problem slows a lot of research, as scientists re-invent the wheel.
This is why the patent system was begun; it was an incentive to share ideas.
Maybe one day we will reverse engineer Coca-Cola.
The distinction is that Connectix is a big company with lots of money, and Remeirdes is just a mere individual.
What, you didn't know that 'more money' == 'more rights'....
Sheesh...
I urge everyone who thinks that DeCSS was reverse engineering to actually read materials such as the transcript of Johansen's testimony. There is simply no evidence that DeCSS was the product of legitimate reverse engineering. Not just once but twice anonymous information was contributed to crack the problem in a form that does not resemble what one would get from treating the system as a black box. Johansen testified: "Yes, I believe the CSS authentication had been posted anonymously in Assembler language on the Internet, and Derek Fawcus had picked that up and rewritten it in C language and posted it on his website." Note the word "Assembler". Johansen also testified that he was given further information from a complete stranger on IRC. On the Livid-dev mailing list on Saturday, October 02, 1999 Eric Smith had posted: "The specific issue WRT the CSS code is that the x86 code was apparently simply ripped out of a working commerical implementation (which was presumably copyrighted)" to which Derek Fawcus had replied "Well I guess it might have been, but I don't _know_ that." (Fawcus went on to explain how he had "worked to understand the algorithm underlying the x86 code.") Why the developers didn't run away as fast as they could once there were questions is something I cannot understand. Didn't anyone learn from previous examples such as Compaq's reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS? Compaq set up their reverse engineering effort so that at every stage they could prove the source of information using engineers whom they could assert did not have prior exposure to IBM IP.
I don't think so. These two cases look exactly equivalent to me.
The supremely ironic thing is that bleem! actually makes money for Sony. The actual Playstation consoles are - and always have been - sold at a loss. Sony makes its money from titles. If you purchase bleem! and a bunch of titles, you give Sony its profits from the titles without incurring the loss to them of having to buy a console :)
I'm sure there's a flaw in this reasoning somewhere...
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
If they use the same annoying business model as mobile phones for 1$ and you have to sign a contract with the company, flat-rate offers (in europe), to name it, low entry level fees, it is their problem.
Company can't rely on customers using their contracts they way they intend it, unless they put it in the contract.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
While there were bits here and there of the spec that were not exactly as things were in reality I would not characterise the little bits of data dumping here and there to clarify the intent of the format as reverse engineering
C.
I sometimes write stuff
God hasn't done much to stop the progress of Science, however, his self-proclaimed agencies certainly have. To this day the Christian Church is a major hindrance to Science
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
C.
I sometimes write stuff
C.
I sometimes write stuff
It doesn't matter what it says if the courts say that such a restriction is illegal. You can add a clause to the front of a book that states "transends fair use", or even "transends US Constitution". That doesn't mean it *does*.
And I can swear that most of the Mexicans do not wear sombreros anymore
Any hat is a 'sombrero'.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Perhaps He choose not to apply for a patent?
But is there a legal distinction? I can't see any. Unless one assumes that individuals are always only wanting to steal, and corporations are mature enough to want to stay within the bounds. Bullshit!
Absurdity seems to be winning by a landslide. The patent office seems to be decades behind with no hope of catching up. I don't see one court case sweeping all of this away.
Using a clean room is no guarentee that you are "clean". Its about patterns in the code. If you independently arrive at the same code you are screwed. Independence of discovery is no defense.
Edison? Stupid American. Try Alexander Graham Bell instead.
"But that's the extent to which the two cases should be compared [note: Sony vs. Connectix & the DeCSS case], because each contains some important distinctions, says Keith Kupferschmid, intellectual property counsel at the Software and Information Industry Association, a trade association of about 1,200 software and information companies based in Washington, D.C."
What kaosmunkee was saying is that there is *no* distinction between Sony vs. [bleem,Connectix] and the DeCSS case.
Note: kaosmunkee was comparing bleem and DeCSS while the article was comparing the Connectix and DeCSS cases, however his point still stands.
The only issue of anonymous information is whether any of that may have come from people who have signed NDAs. Trade secrets are like patents (covering ideas) but with copyright style rules for when they apply (if you rediscover it, someone's trade secret doesn't apply).
But then the people to sue are those who violate the NDA, yes? If you never signed an NDA and someone gives you the information (who is violating the NDA and hence could be sued) then aren't you clear to scream it from the rooftops?
Since they had an open book with the original source code, that's not "reverse engineering," that's "re-engineering."
What you call "re-engineering" *is* reverse engineering.
D
No.
A while back you paid for the hardware and the software came along with it, including upgrades and support.
Later people started charging for using their software to go with other peoples' hardware.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Perhaps Sony figures that Bleem! users are more likely to be using pirated games? It's slightly more of a hassle to chip a PSX to accept burned cd's than it is to use Bleem! to work with .iso images from your local warez site, right?
But ppl who want to pirate games will always find a way. I don't think Bleem lowers the bar that much. So I'm not sure what Sony's deal is either. I mean I can get a chipped console for less than $100 now--and I can use a real "dual shock" controller and get DDR pads too ;) and not deal with all hassle of emulating a psx on my pc....
The IBM PC was reverse engineered. Barely within the boundary of legality. But legal, nonetheless. If this had not happened, would we now live in the so-called "information age"? Probaly not. Reverse engineering and mass-producing the IBM PC clone put real computing power in the hands of almost anyone who really wanted it. Why should we now make illicit the same proletarian and, dare I say, egalitarian mechanism that put us where we are today?
Just take a look at Outlook.
They import lots of other people's mail formats... but try getting your mailbox OUT of exchange and into someone else's format.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
> What is being done to repeal the DMCA? Are there
> technology-savvy lawyers out fighting battles
> for us, and if not, are any reading this
> message?
Yes. The Eric Corley/2600/DeCSS case has the potential to overturn a lot of the most objectionable parts of the DMCA. There were stories about it on Slashdot over the last week.
Nietzsche proclaimed God's death already in 1882, which means both copyright and patents have expired, and everything is public domain now©
--------------------------------------
- Don't use the install program or, if you do, click on "I Disagree." This way you're not agreeing to the EULA.
- Use some free utility from the net to unpackage the CAB files (or whatever format the data is stored in).
- Reverse-engineer to your heart's content.
As long as there's no legislation making all reverse-engineering illegal, you haven't broken the software license (because you never agreed to it in the first place) and therefore you're still within your legal rights.Now I imagine someday the CAB files and whatnot will be encrypted so this method won't work, and will fall under the same umbrella as the current DeCSS case.
I'm the "moron" who wanted you to fess up with your moderating habits. But I have to say that I liked your old .sig better.
I was under the impression that the Eric Corley / 2600 / DeCSS case wasn't going very well for our heroes.
As part the judgement in AT&T's Patent Infringement case against WU, AT&T got to use all of Edison's improvements (the carbon microphone being one that lasted until the 1970s.)
in danger. I mean if you have to get a pack of lawyers, and walk a legal minefield just to develop a product, people are going to do it somewhere else. With the net as it is today, this really is not a big deal.
Also has been said here before, but most of these large companies got their start doing the very same things they are now trying to make illegal. Just protecting the cash cow.
Blogging because I can...
Yes, yes, and yes.
Bleem was to play it on another platform. DeCSS was to copy, as far as the courts were concerned. If a commercial agency were doing it, it probably would have passed because nobody could copy DVDs from it. But since it's open source, it's less difficult to copy DVDs, and thus is more likely to breach fair use. Anyway, I don't entirely agree with the DMCA, but that's as close as I can come to seeing their rationale.
"The Reimerdes case dealt with somebody who didn't have a right to the DVD but was cracking through it to get the code, whereas the Connectix case dealt with a situation where a company was legally entitled to be using the code and reverse-engineering it for purposes of interoperability," he explains.
Can someone explain to me why DeCSS doesn't count as "for the purposes of interoperability"? I thought the whole point was to make DVD work on Linux? And, as far as him not having the right to it.... Does that mean that I don't have the right to [loop start]keep making VCDs on my home system, and run them on my DVD player[loop end] until it works?
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
Despite your opinion of the current status of UCITA, I think that it is far from dead. Take a look at this map to see where UCITA lobbying activities are underway. Check out anti-UCITA ucita.com. and pro-UCITA ucitaonline.com. It's still an issue that has to be followed or it'll take us all by surprise one day, by becoming the law of the land.
Ed
You make a valid point, but he's telling the truth.. look up the book on Amazon... it exists.
I suppose it's just impossible for us to ever verify that's it's not actually about his pet cat, seeing as we'll never be able to buy the book. (except used, libraries, etc)
But then the people to sue are those who violate the NDA, yes? If you never signed an NDA and someone gives you the information (who is violating the NDA and hence could be sued) then aren't you clear to scream it from the rooftops?
No, my impression is that if the source of the information can be traced back to a trade secret, the company can get an injunction against you from using it. From my understanding, if, for example, some project leader in Microsoft were to post the source code to something, and say, "here, this will make it easier to make your stuff interoperate", Microsoft could come by a year later and say, "oh, he was never given permission to do that, he violated his NDA, and all that stuff is trade secrets". I'm sure there's checks to make sure it isn't abused this blatantly, but I think you have hit on one of the biggest problems of trade secrets.
wvware (AFAIK) isn't by Microsoft, and the docs for the word format were 1) Incomplete and 2) Pulled from MSDN soon after they were put up
Sense will lose as long as absurdity remains more profitable, period. Kind of a downside to our wonderful free economy.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
I used dasm a pair of times and once you know what code your gcc generates following a function is pretty straightforward, but what amazed me most is when i knew that you can decompile Java bytecode and get the source back with this.
M$ posted the specs to Word documents for version 8 (aka Word97) on the MSDN site and on the MSDN CDs. The documentation has since been pulled from the web site, but is now available from other sites such as wotsit. The program wvWare is an open source program that can read "word 2000, 97, 95 and 6 file formats." I assume that the ability to read Word2000 files is based on reverse engineering.
I dunno. Although it had more to do with copyright infringement rather than reverse engineering, the church of scientology had a pretty big lawsuit a while back...
Yes but there's a danger here, and that is that if someone can reverse-engineer the PlayStation, that means it's possible to determine how the machine works without shelling out big bucks to Sony. This means that their entire business model, which consists of losing money on the consoles while sticking it to developers in licensing fees just so they can find out what makes the damned thing tick, collapses and they'd be forced to develop a MORE secure, MORE proprietary console in order to keep going, or risk their console turning into an open commodity like the PC. Given the fact that the PlayStation 2 is their first step in their master plan to conquer the world of broadcast and online media, I don't think they're going to let that happen. So, Sony will continue to treat reverse engineering of their hardware as a serious crime, regardles of what the law actually says.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Can I reverse-engineer MS Word and write a word processor that can read and save .DOC files?
What about StarOffice -- technically speaking, hasn't this been going on for a while? http://www.sun.com/products/staroffice/
Just a thought.
Dan
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
oh well.. my bad
A lot of the *nix drivers are done by reverse-engineering. I know of a couple of Linmodem driver projects that started with a copy of the binary of the corresponding Winmodem. Reverse engineering applied in the purpose of getting hardware specs out of the driver is OK with most of the driver companies. The Win/Lin modem manufacturers care mostly about the SP processing algorithms rather than the DSP specs. The problem with reverse engineering for these modems is that together with the hardware specs, there is sufficient information about what SP algorithm they are using that a sufficienly knowledgeable person can reverse engineer everything out of their driver.
"The Reimerdes case dealt with somebody who didn't have a right to the DVD but was cracking through it to get the code, whereas the Connectix case dealt with a situation where a company was legally entitled to be using the code and reverse-engineering it for purposes of interoperability."
Keith Kupferschmid, intellectual property counsel at the Software and Information Industry Association
I may be missing something here, but I don't see the distinction. PlayStation is a proprietary platform. PlayStation games were built to run on that platform. bleem! was written to allow people who had purchased a license to a PlayStation game to play it on some platform other than PlayStation.
DVD players are a proprietary platform (because of the "decryption" code they contain). DVD's are built (encoded) to be played on that platform. DeCSS was written to allow people who had purchased a license to a DVD movie to play it on some platform other than a commercial DVD player.
Am I missing something here?
Created Word2K document with pictures, opened doc file in SO made some changes and saved as SO file, opened new file in SO and saved as Office2000 file, opened document in Office2000.
I lost all my pictures and some formatting. Not as bad as say doing an English to Spanish to English translation on Babelfish but bad enough to know I couldn't use SO at work.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
There were once MSDN docs for XL's biff records and some of the more general escher records used in office97 for drawings. While writing Gnumeric's XL import/export facilities we have frequently run up against the limits of these documents. Even when the specs are are crystal clear (not frequent) they do not cover what the information represents. Knowing that the colour is 'index 65' (with a valid range of 8-63) is not helpful... It is certainly possible to get a fair amount of information, including pivot tables and charts, but getting it all is far from complete in Gnumeric or StarOffice.
The fact that they didnt hassle you and the assumption that they wont hassle you are two entierly different things.
What would happen when a young gun lawyer comes along with no morals and heaps of ambitions to make a name for itself?
The same thing that happens when a young gun copper comes along and gives you a ticket for treating a red light the same as a stop sign at 3am in the morning when there is no other traffic around! Just to help get a promotion.
While not everyone in the world is like this, as I have met some real cool coppers and lawyers in my time, some people only care about climbing on top of others and profiting from their misery. Dont let the inaction of the MS legal team fool you.
Does it go on forever?
Will all the hardware and media being locked up to deny people the ability to exercise rights such time shifting, fair use, etc, in favour of having to pay for these conveniences, what the world needs is an organisation, perhaps a bit like the EFF, dedicated to legally reverse-engineering media cripples (such as CSS) and publishing easy-to-follow instructions online, such that Joe Average on the street can time-shift HDTV if he desires, or Joe Geek on his computer can play DVDs on linux with an open-source and uncrippled player, or Joe Apple can download a movie trailer that was officially posted online and write it to DVD with his new apple computer.
:-(
I'd donate, and so perhaps donations could provide a cash and fame incentive for hackers to reverse engineer these attempts at bypassing our rights.
Projects like the cripple-free DivX box projects could also be aided by the foundation.
Lawyers would probably be needed as well
I'd love to write a report generator that creates raw, but well formated, Excel files without having to depend on OLE/COM and the ever buggy MS Excel.
I thought god was dead. How come I'm always the last to hear these things?!
It's my understanding that a few Adobe apps (Pagemaker, Acrobat, InDesign, any more?) can read and write the PDF file format.
It's a pretty useful format but as far as I know there are no open-source writers for it. Is this because there's something legally keeping reverse engineers(!) from working on it or is it just a tough nut to crack?
One thing about the Word spec is that it depends on the "OLE Structured Stream format", which is an undocumented spec, but is of course built into Windows and is an extention to MacOS. That's where the embedded stuff like Spreadsheets and even some 'built-in' stuff like line art come in.
The thing to realize about Microsoft releasing the Word spec is that they very carefully wanted to give 3rd Party vendors enough information to create DOC files that Word could open, *but not* information to open any DOC file that Word created. So what you see is a subset of information that Word is committed to support.
And as another sidenote on the Word issue, I imagine that Microsoft themselves has a few employees dedicated full time to 'reverse-engineering' the Word format when they plan a new release. Even MS has had interoperability problems (for example, Word 97 before the service pack).
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
You might have something here.
If There Is A God, and if God Created Everything, then God Has The Patent On Everything, and since Patents Run Out After 17 Years, then The Patents On Everything Ran Out oo-17 Years Ago.
So invisibility belts, two-way neural communicator implants, and The Transporter, would all be public domain by now.
If I wasn't an Atheist.
--Blair
Or (I'll save the Brits the trouble and make this joke for them) God's not American.
StarOffice by Sun Microsystems can read and write .doc
C'mon guys, would ya please outlaw reverse-engineering? Please? Pleeeeeeease?
also check out ps2pdf.com its pretty cool. you can upload postscript files and it will convert them into pdf files for you. this is nice if you dont have access to a unix machine.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Actually, that's not entirely true. Most end-user applications include not only the software code itself, but also a variety of icons, text, trademarks, and maybe some patented features.
None of these can be put into another work without violating the law.
"The problem is that the common rules for ethics are flawed. There are weaknesses in the common rules for ethics because while they promote various virtues, they also promote weakness in the face of unethical behavior by others.
This is a problem, and opens a can of worms."
The chaos of the digital age leaves us grasping at straws. People are not following any specific set of rules beyond momentary personal convenience, which ultimately has lead to police states, burned out enviroments, fished-out oceans, etc etc etc.
In Reverse engineering, the same potential is there, but we are seeing it at another level, in another arena. It is a symptom of a larger situation.
Bottom Line, we need to get our shit together and work this out before it gets truely screwed up in the legal system (I know it already is screwed up, but it is not thoroughly entrenched yet)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
How many of them support referential integrity (or foreign keys) ? postgres does, but it's quite recent. Access is quite nice for a toy database, but I take your point about it's scalability.
http://www.xenu.net
--
Reverse engineering does not mean black box methods. Black box methods are one technique of reverse engineering. They have the advantage of looking a little better when lawsuits come around, and the disadvantage of being much harder.
Compaq used clean room techniques because of what it was they were doing. When writing low level code, and it has to be bug compatible with something else, you're going to recreate the exact code that was in the original, because there's only so many ways to do something. Now copyright isn't like patents in what it protects. Patents protect the idea, even if you rediscover it. Copyright only protect a specific implementation. For a patent, it doesn't matter how you came up with the idea. On the other hand, for copyright, it only matters how you got the idea. If I get an idea for a poem, and come up with something that's nearly identical to some obscure Robert Frost piece, the courts would start with the presumption that since it's so similar, it must be a copy, but if I could prove that I had never read the poem, nor anything that referred to the poem, or had any knowledge that the poem existed, then my version would be mine. Probably this would make it even more of a pain for the next person to spontaneously come up with this poem.
With a patent, on the other hand, if I have a blinding flash in my algebra class and write down some patented algorithm, it's still infringing. It doesn't matter that I never heard of it.
Coming back to DeCSS, if the algorithm is obtained by disassembling the assembly, and then that algorithm is published in a natural language description, then the same author does an implementation in C, it's probably okay. The C isn't going to directly lift anything from the assembly except some of the tables. Given the principle that data cannot be copyrighted (you can't copyright the fact that your study shows that 53% of tech workers want to kill their boss), you could argue that the tables are also not a creative work.
The only issue of anonymous information is whether any of that may have come from people who have signed NDAs. Trade secrets are like patents (covering ideas) but with copyright style rules for when they apply (if you rediscover it, someone's trade secret doesn't apply).
This is pretty similar to the CIFS (SMB) document. It's basically incomplete and contains may errors and omissions. Windows also breaks this "standard" all the time.
The documentation's out of date simply because Microsoft's own dev team haven't kept up with their documentation. That's why the Samba team occasionally get to gloat the Microsoft refer people to Samba for protocol documentation.
Patents now persist for the authors life + 95, so I doubt that they'd be running out anytime soon.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Not correct..
I have tried several times few months ago to write a small report and give it to a user with Office 97 - he couldn't open it.
Worse - some versions of Office 97 don't read other office 97 docs! try to send an english docs that was written with Hebrew/Arabic support to a user with Office 97 - he won't be able to read the docs (comes messy)
Hetz (Heunique)
Two years ago an Australian court ruled reverse engineering to be lawful (Slashdot story, October 1999) . Other jurisdictions outside the US have given similar positive decisions.
Scroogle
There's also a specific clause in the MSDN license that basically says you are not allowed to use any information contained in the MSDN to reverse-engineering document formats to produce competing products.
How are companies that prevent you from creating (they own everything you think while employed in cluding at home) and then wait to implement what you thought in a dream until everyone is screaming, how are they important in the US economy?
All they do is gum it up and drive it to the ground.
They're only important to the economy that is themselves.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
The DVDCCA/MPAA wasn't able to provide any proof that anything was obtained improperly. They're the ones who have to prove their case (innocent until proven guilty, remember?).
--
not plane, nor bird, nor even frog...
Well maybe this is becuase God know Satan would intervene on their behalf. And in hell they have ALOT of lawyers.
"Imagine someone wanting to format a document without printing it?!? Gasp"
I tripped over the same PageSetup problem a few years ago, but I soon realized it made perfect sense.
You can format the document (i.e. fonts, colors, cell properties, etc) - but, you can't format it for a specific printer, without knowing the properties of the printer (i.e. properties controlled by PageSetup). Without knowing what paper sizes and formats your printer/plotter supports, you can't sensibly set page breaks, margins, orientation, etc.
I think you're off-base on the assumption that file formats are going to be more stable from version-to-version, compared with the COM interface, because the COM interface is the public one. There may be a small handful of COM interfaces that worked for, say, Office 95 that don't work for Office 2000 (although, I can't identify any specific ones - can you?). However, the file formats have changed substantially.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
...is available from a number of places, such as OpenOffice. Another small skip-and-a-jump down the road to World Domination.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
You don't seem to understand. This is slashdot.org and thus if someone can rip on Microsoft no matter how unsubstantiated it might be, they are going to do it.
For instance, if there is an article about using child labor in New Guinea to create rubber bouncing balls... You can guarantee that slashdot.org will post the article with the comment, "How can we stop Microsoft from utilizing child labor?"
I agree, I have never heard of Microsoft ever suing anyone for reverse engineering their data formats.
I'd just like to point out that Microsoft have released the full-specs for Word .doc files and an open source .doc reader is available, it's called wvware.
-- Conexant/Rockwell Modem HOWTO http://linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Conexant+Rockwell-modem
A program that does REAL decompiling =) But with some expirience you can make head and tails out of the great ASM stuff that IDA Pro creates .. (check out www.datarescue.com for examples) ..
I like the EU, where RE for interoperability is allowed =)
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
I wonder if the supreme court refused to hear the connectix case because they were waiting for a DMCA case to come along? I would think by deciding not to hear the case that had just been overturned, the supreme court was showing support for the appeals court decision and supporting RE, but maybe they just wanted to wait for a bigger fish to fry (DMCA) which I'm sure they'll be reviewing within the next few years...
But is it legal to forbid it?
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
You might want to check VBS & JS encryption.
It make the code totally unreadable.
I think that you will something similar, or else you'll have MSIL compile it to true binary, for each and every supported platform, and distribue as binary rather than MSIL.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
I'm confused. Possibly so is the author of this article. He seems to imply that UCITA is a pending piece of federal legislation, rather than state legislation. As it is, UCITA appears to be dead and buried in most states (hooray!).
He draws a line between the Reimerdes and Connectix cases by quoting that Reimerdes "didn't have a right to the DVD". Did he steal it? More confusion.
Anyway, it seems the 9th Circuit gets overturned all the time, so I wouldn't get too hopeful about this being a positive sign.
How does a company that prevents its employees from inventing make money?
Who in their right mind would even bother to innovate anymore for a company that doesn't pay them any more than hourly wages, when they could be paid those hourly wages just for doing the grunt work?
I sure wouldn't pass on my inventions to a company that didn't respect my rights to them. Even if I were employed by said company.
What taxes?
What do they supply other companies if nothing other than a boatload of NDAs?
My point is the vested interests are going to screw their opportunities.
Artists who find out they can do well in their neighborhood will stay in their neighborhood and play there, no tours, no gimmicks, no awards shows, just pure freedom to do whatever the fuck you like with no one owning you.
That's coming soon.
And there is nothing the vested interests can do to stop it.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
No, because Auntie EULA forbids it, and she'll get uncle Bill and uncle Steve to watch over you if you even try.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Sun hasn't done anything at all about this, they just completely ignore the issue as far as I've seen.
Maybe I'm just an overly idealistic Slashdot weenie, but I don't see a problem here. In my humble opinion, a user should be able to decompile and examine any code that will be running on his/her machine. Otherwise, every time you run a program, you are trusting the safety and security of your computer, your data, and your network to a pig-in-a-poke.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I'm not arguing that a system that allows for decompilation is a bad thing, I'm just pointing out that many large corportations are likely to take issue with it.
Nope, copyright does...
This seems highly unlikely, as I long ago proved that quite a few MS file formats cannot be reverse engineered (see my out-of-print book Reversed Engineering Undocumented Windows File Formats - It Can't Be Done!)"
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
Let's take a look at the telephone.
Before Mr. Edison made his new and improved telephone, there was an older version (which, I'm sure, had a patent on it). In order for him to make his own telephone, he either would have to work from scratch, get the details from the company/patent, or get a license. Patents exist, of course, to give the original creator money in compensation for his/her efforts. If a creator does not let others gain access to the technology, a monopoly is essentially created. Should patents be ignored under such circumstances (so we could have a better telephone for example)?
Whether or not this situation is historically accurate, is it right to do this? (unless there's some stupid patent on the whole concept which happens too much these days anyways)
if the supreme court re-confirms that reverse engineering is legal, and the distribution of circumvention code is legal under the fair use doctrine...
wouldn't that basically nuke the RIAA and MPAA back to the stone age???
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
speaking of absudity it appears i am now redundant because i chose to agree with someone else's opinion. YAY for morons.
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
Java is in pretty much the same boat with regards to decompilation. There are Java compilers that can take .class files and spit out valid and VERY readable Java source code (basically you only lose the comments and the original names of any member-local variables). Sun hasn't done anything at all about this, they just completely ignore the issue as far as I've seen. There are obfuscators that do a pretty good job of confusing the available automatic decompilers, but none of them are from Sun or officially sanctioned (and they tend to cause 'odd' Java code which seems more likely to break JVMs).
Of course, Java has been primarily a server side technology, so its not as much of an issue... With .NET Microsoft is currently targetting the server mainly but I agree it will be interesting to see what happens in the future. Will they actually release an MSIL of Office 11 (or whatever), knowing that it could be decompiled into fairly readable C#? Not likely.
There is no need for a lawsuit. The threat of nuclear war and incurable man-made disease is enough.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
(Others may want to correct any huge mistakes I make in my analysis...)
.NET-capable languages are compiled to MSIL ("Microsoft Intermediate Language") which is _not_ machine-specific, nor is it as low-level even as Java's bytecodes; it is quite human-readable (calls like System.Console.Print etc. are in the clear; variable and memory accessor functions however are done via registers) and readily reversible. This MSIL can then be just-in-time compiled to machine-specific code by the MSIL VM.
My understanding is that all
As of Visual Studio Beta 1, MS were non-committal on how they were going to handle reverse-engineering issues, since it's a whole heap easier to do that now than ever (well, ever since VB 2, anyway, which also wrote out its code in the clear).
Presumably they will have to come up with a strategy that lets the developer target x86 at build time, rather than MSIL...?
Cheers
Alastair
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
I see alot of Anti-DMCA and related things talk on Slashdot, but its not clear what the next step beyond talk is. What is being done to repeal the DMCA? Are there technology-savvy lawyers out fighting battles for us, and if not, are any reading this message?
Also, how enforceable has the DMCA been? There are lots of activities that could fall under its protection that have not yet been shut down. For example, those in the emulation world have just figured out how to break CPS2 encryption used in many modern Capcom arcade games. It seems that this would be illegal under the DMCA. How many times has it been put to use against reverse engineers / hackers?
Captain_Frisk
I will be easy for a company like Connectix to get away with Reverse Engineering software what happens when individuals do it. Like in the case of DeCss will that be held up in court to? In individuals right to look and explore how things work on thier equipment
Physicists, chemists and biologists have been reverse-engineering the world for centuries, and yet God didn't file a lawsuit. I take it as an endorsement of reverse-engineering by God himself.
From PlanetIT article:
"The Reimerdes case dealt with somebody who didn't have a right to the DVD but was cracking through it to get the code, whereas the Connectix case dealt with a situation where a company was legally entitled to be using the code and reverse-engineering it for purposes of interoperability."
Keith Kupferschmid, intellectual property counsel at the Software and Information Industry Association
I may be missing something here, but I don't see the distinction. PlayStation is a proprietary platform. PlayStation games were built to run on that platform. bleem! was written to allow people who had purchased a license to a PlayStation game to play it on some platform other than PlayStation.
DVD players are a proprietary platform (because of the "decryption" code they contain). DVD's are built (encoded) to be played on that platform. DeCSS was written to allow people who had purchased a license to a DVD movie to play it on some platform other than a commercial DVD player.
Am I missing something here?
--Kaos
I dunno, sometimes I lay awake at night wondering if the powers at be really understand the decisions they make. Given all other decisions I see, I can't understand how reverse engineering can be legal. I have talked with big companies that use the "cold room" technique for reverse engineering. Engineers in a room totally separated from the technology develop the usually un protected equivalent. I just dunno.
-Moondog
Under the DMCA and UCITA it could be quite legal for a program developer who integrates some 'intelectual property' (magic numbers, etc)into the databases that contain YOUR data could prevent a competitive company from importing or in any way using the data in that databse. Sounds nice and scary, doesn't it.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
One can use pdfTeX, which is a modified TeX that is designed to write PDF rather than DVI. There is also dvipdfm which creates a PDF file from a TeX DVI file. Others have already mentioned ps2pdf.
I myself have used dvipdfm and ps2pdf.
Probably the reason why Microsoft didn't sue you is because it didn't cause them any direct harm, and it would make them look like a Big Evil Company trying to squish the little competition.
Which they are, but no sense in encouraging that image unless it's profitable.
"Proper decompilers" have been in the works for a loooong time, but dont expect any of them to appear anytime soon. The problem is that the executable put out by different compilers is too different to have a fairly generic way of recovering C code. Something that can decompile gcc will be unlikely to work with the madness of gcc -O2 and with the opposite kind of madness from MSVC.
Java and Visual Basic are different stories, they can be decomiled fairly easily because: 1) all of the compilers are made by Sun and MS respectively. 2) they are interpreted languages with abstract instruction sets.
RE presents a unique opportunity: A facility for determining a natural expiration on copyright.
The duration of copyright is arbitrary. Some have suggested that the duration of copyright for software be shortened, but it would still be arbitrary.
Unlike music, literature, and other copyrighted works, software has a distinquishing property. It is possible to create a program that works exactly as the original without copying the original.
Thus, the time that it takes to reverse engineer a piece of software establishes a natural duration for the copyright on the original. This is not to say that we should revoke copyright on the original once a RE has occured. It simply says that RE renders the copyright on the original somewhat moot. If the RE product is distributed gratis, the money value of the original copyright is eliminated.
To a certain extent, this is already the way things are. So, if RE is legal (so long as it doesn't involve actual reuse of copyrighted code) I have no problem with it. Under such circumstances, the Free Software community takes on the job of establishing the natural duration of copyright in a free market.
Of course now I will probably hear from some people who don't believe in a natural right to IP; but I do, and so do a lot of other people. It is unlikely we will ever agree on that issue, but perhaps we can agree to RE as a standard for limiting copyright.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I reverse engineered quite a few MS file formats (see my out-of-print book Undocumented Windows File Formats) and never had any hassles from MS regarding the reverse engineering.
In fact, MS tried to hire me to provide them with the specs for one of their file formats. Apparently the author of the code never documented the file format. MS had released specs for it, but they were completely wrong.
After being told by several friends that MS was notorious for delaying payment with contractors, I asked for half the money up-front. They refused and I never did the work.
But I digress. I reverse engineered a number of file formats that were "proprietary" Microsoft files. If they're going to go after anyone for it, surely they would have gone after me since I was publishing them left and right in magazines and my book.
I've figured ever since then that MS must have known that the whole thing about reverse engineering in their licenses must be unenforceable.
You can also look at all the work Andrew Schulman and Matt Pietrek did reverse engineering Windows code and the PE file format and neither of them ever got hassled either, as far as I know.
Pete Davis