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Tridgell Reveals Bitkeeper Secrets

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stare-into-my-secret-places dept.

wallykeyster writes "The Register is reporting on Andrew Tridgell publicly demonstrating how to interoperate with Bitkeeper. During his keynote at the Linux.Conf.Au, Tridgell connected to a BitKeeper site via telnet and used the mostly forgotten "help" tool. Ethical arguments of aside, what really counts as reverse engineering anyway?"

2 of 373 comments (clear)

  1. Give me a break... by winkydink · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I've just reversed engineered MS Exchange. Here's my demo:

    sh-2.05b$ telnet mail.egl.net 25
    Trying 208.159.114.4...
    Connected to mail.egl.net.
    Escape character is '^]'.
    220 vmail2.iserv.net ESMTP
    help
    214 qmail home page: http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html

    I hope he has something more substantial to back himself up than a weak joke.

    --

    "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey

  2. Re:The DCMA says a lot of things... by eco2geek · · Score: 1, Flamebait
    He was released.

    Yes, after sitting in jail for a month, then coming up with $50K for bail, and not being allowed to leave the US and go home to his family for another four months.

    The fact that he was charged doesn't mean anything, except perhaps that

    ...corporations cause to pass, then use US law to fuck people over, even people who live in other countries and aren't violating their country's laws.

    Sorry for the rant, but this episode's going to remain a sore spot for a long, long time.