Because lawyers view the law as some isolated specialization that needs no connection to any other aspect of the world, real or imagined. It is viewed by most lawyers as an amoral disconnected dance in which both sides usually jargon-heavy language to defeat each other, whilst simultaneously baffling laymen. The Law is a ritual that, unfortunately, has real world consequences but as little actual relation to the real world as its high priests can manage.
I look at corporate management as being like a torturers' club. Sure, when you first join, you're shocked that your coworkers like to clamp jumper cables on to peoples' penises, but after a bit of desensitization, you're eager to take part as well.
In other words, corporations encourage sociopathic behavior, to the point that even normal people become inhuman monsters who justify the most depraved activities with the phrase "We're responsible for good returns for the shareholders". You know, much like how all those motherfuckers we tried at Nuremberg would defend themselves with the excuse "We were just following orders."
The rewards that await anyone who could mass produce lab-grown meat would be pretty substantial. Proof of concept demonstrates that it can be done, now someone can work out how to do it cheap. Right now, it's a gimmick. In fifty years, well, I have a feeling that for a lot of folks in the industrialized world, this may be a major source of protein.
The first electronic computers took up entire floors of office buildings, consumed insane amounts of power, required ridiculous amounts of maintenance per running hour for just a few thousand calculations per second. It wasn't really economically feasible to imagine anything but the largest governments or academic or commercial interests ever being able to afford one, and yet, 70 years later, one of its descendants sits in my pocket, with a processing and memory capacity millions of greater than those first behemoths.
ENIAC cost about $6 million USD in current monetary value to build, and my iPhone probably costs $100 to $200. The whole point is that the first try at anything is going to be atrociously expensive and likely inadequate in many ways and yet, all things begin somewhere.
Translation: I don't like what researchers say, so I'll call them idiots and poopie-heads, and then take my own head and shove it firmly up my own ass.
In other words we have to harness the amoral powers of sociopathy to good ends. We have to convince the psychopaths we've allowed to rule our society that it's in their best interests (which is all they give a flying fuck about) not to harvest us for our flesh, but rather to use their absolute lack of concern for any human being other than themselves for the greater good.
Absolute nonsense. Dalvik and other Android components have been heavily optimized within the Linux kernel and userspace. Yes, I'm sure parts of Android probably are portable, but considering Linux's appeal both for its available source code and its licensing, why would Google even want to waste enormous resources moving it to another OS?
In other words it's going to do malloc() a big pile of memory, then throw the actual code all over the place, linked together with a helluva lot of jmps and indexes to keep track of them. Yes, I'm sure if every second or third clock cycle is spent leaping over the process's malloced space to fetch the next instruction or the next byte from the symbol table, it may be too complex to actually decompile to reproduce a reasonable representation of the original source code. But as others have pointed out, that level of disassembly isn't necessary for some level of reverse engineering, where you may only be looking for certain things like encryption keys or entry points to insert your own code. In other words, some degree of useful reverse engineering doesn't require reproducing a complete asm file.
But really, if half the byte code is jmps, then any claim that it would run at anything like an unscrambled program is BS. I think what we're talking about here is a program that, as a physical set of binaries and libraries, may be busted up in various complicated ways, but that via the bootstrap process will be reassembled in some sort of sensible order so that your standard operating system and hardware isn't taxed bumping program counters around in mad ways.
If ultimately that's what it is, well one can still presumably map access to kernel and userland objects like system calls, device drivers, shared memory and the like. Yes the byte code may be an insane mess, but if it's going to run the same way more than once, the patterns of its execution are going to show up in how it accesses its resources.
Now if you're talking about software that basically does all its own input output and talks directly to the hardware (in other words, it's basically an operating system in and of itself), then I can see the advantage. Match with some TPM scheme and it would be very hard to the point of possibly being all but impossible to sniff out what it's doing. That's the situation we're at to some degree with UEFI and similar protected bootloaders, and I'm it would be extended to this paradigm so that at every chain of app downloading, installation and execution the ability to get your hands on the executable and the kernel and general system state would be insanely difficult.
That's because VMs really don't try to hide themselves from the guest. While it might be pretty hard to build a VM that did a good enough job to essentially fool software attempting to identify whether its physical or virtualized hardware that it's running on, we have the source for a number of VMs (ie. KVM and Xen) and if this kind of obfuscated software started showing up on the market, I'm sure there would be a much greater push to make a rock solid virtualized environment that mimicked physical hardware with much more fidelity.
Yup, and if you can run the code, no matter how obfuscated. in a controlled environment like a virtual machine, no matter how complicated it may be, its interaction with the virtualized hardware is going to be observable. I guess you could start writing software that sniffs out that it's in a VM, either by looking for paravirtualization or simply for looking for some subset of bugs or limits in the virtualized hardware that one wouldn't find on actual physical hardware, but that's just the better mouse trap vs. the smarter mouse. Besides, other than in very specialized applications, why would anyone invest in general use software that can only run on certain machines.
Yes, the only way this works is with hardware to back it up. But if we're back to effectively using some sort of dongle to execute, well that road has been well-traveled as well.
Even if all the libraries are statically compiled, it's still going to be making system calls. Yes, it's behavior could be very hard to determine, but unless it's a standalone operating system that runs entirely on its own, it's going to be traceable. Even then, one could still run it in a VM. Perhaps harder to get useful information out of, but still...
If crappy performance is no obstacle, I'm sure you could produce compiled code that is insanely obfuscated. Still, as I said elsewhere, if you can execute it, it can be executed in a debugger and you can watch what it does, and even if it's doing mad long jumps all over its allocated memory, you're going to be able to trace execution. It will betray its functionality.
Unless the software can magically tlel that it's running in a debugger or a sandbox and refuse to execute, it's activity; from stack activity to system calls to memory allocations can be traced.
Yup. At the end of the day, if this is at all useful and the hardware and OSs out there now, it;s still going to have to execute, and if it executes, you can run it through a debugger and watch it.
I'm sure they can further obfuscate the actual code, but at the end of the day the processor is going to have to run machine code, and one way or the other you can tap the processor's activity to read the "decrypted" code. Beyond that, I imagine the performance penalties involved will be monstrous. Even normal obfuscation techniques have pretty heavy penalties.
Life is full of risks. I suspect more lives could be saved by increasing highway patrols or passing laws requiring rubber tread on bathtubs or increasing funding for CPR training than will be saved by spying on who I talk to on Skype.
Let me turn your question on its head. Is there are any level of surveillance you would be unable to tolerate in the quest for safety?
Indeed. If you're going to the trouble of recording HTTP and SMTP protocol commands, then it's absolutely fucking trivial to grab the entire message or the contents of the web pages in question. I cannot imagine an organization that will happily lie to Congress about what it's doing giving a flying fuck about some restriction on recording just metadata. You can be damned sure they're pulling off copies of all unencrypted TCP and UDP traffic. Maybe they won't retain content for as long as they retain metadata, but I can well imagine them being able to easily store several months or longer worth of unencrypted data. Obviously encrypted data poses a larger problem, but you can be damned sure that if they've sent their boys to Microsoft, Google and any other major handler of data with super-secret orders to give them a network connection, they've got the full co-operation of commercial CAs.
You will notice they only reveal as much as the Guardian and Washington Post has already provided from Snowden's leaks. First, they claimed the program didn't exist, and then they admitted they were doing some things, but it was all very targeted, and now they're admitted that millions of people are being caught in the net due to second and third hand associations to people they're eavesdropping on. I'm sure the next revelations will demonstrate that they are capturing various unencrypted data streams, and indeed even supposedly encrypted ones like Skype. They will admit that, which will ultimately lead us all to realize that the US and its allies are pretty much spying on every human being with any kind of Internet connection.
The age of information freedom is gone. We're just going to have to accept that the governments of democratic states, however good their intentions, have become as much surveillance junkies as the dictatorships the West so believes it is superior to. We will also have to admit that our lawmakers are pathetic weak-kneed capitulators that have knowingly sold us up the river, no matter how much handwringing they'll take part in right now.
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It's not our duty to improve your experience. You bought a tablet with little third party developer support, so suck it up.
Because lawyers view the law as some isolated specialization that needs no connection to any other aspect of the world, real or imagined. It is viewed by most lawyers as an amoral disconnected dance in which both sides usually jargon-heavy language to defeat each other, whilst simultaneously baffling laymen. The Law is a ritual that, unfortunately, has real world consequences but as little actual relation to the real world as its high priests can manage.
I look at corporate management as being like a torturers' club. Sure, when you first join, you're shocked that your coworkers like to clamp jumper cables on to peoples' penises, but after a bit of desensitization, you're eager to take part as well.
In other words, corporations encourage sociopathic behavior, to the point that even normal people become inhuman monsters who justify the most depraved activities with the phrase "We're responsible for good returns for the shareholders". You know, much like how all those motherfuckers we tried at Nuremberg would defend themselves with the excuse "We were just following orders."
Open the pod bay door, HAL.
I dunno. I was pretty wasted the last time I watched Polar Express, and I still found it pretty unwatchable.
The rewards that await anyone who could mass produce lab-grown meat would be pretty substantial. Proof of concept demonstrates that it can be done, now someone can work out how to do it cheap. Right now, it's a gimmick. In fifty years, well, I have a feeling that for a lot of folks in the industrialized world, this may be a major source of protein.
The first electronic computers took up entire floors of office buildings, consumed insane amounts of power, required ridiculous amounts of maintenance per running hour for just a few thousand calculations per second. It wasn't really economically feasible to imagine anything but the largest governments or academic or commercial interests ever being able to afford one, and yet, 70 years later, one of its descendants sits in my pocket, with a processing and memory capacity millions of greater than those first behemoths.
ENIAC cost about $6 million USD in current monetary value to build, and my iPhone probably costs $100 to $200. The whole point is that the first try at anything is going to be atrociously expensive and likely inadequate in many ways and yet, all things begin somewhere.
No, the lesson is "Shoot everything in sight and fuck the wagon trains coming after you."
Translation: I don't like what researchers say, so I'll call them idiots and poopie-heads, and then take my own head and shove it firmly up my own ass.
In other words we have to harness the amoral powers of sociopathy to good ends. We have to convince the psychopaths we've allowed to rule our society that it's in their best interests (which is all they give a flying fuck about) not to harvest us for our flesh, but rather to use their absolute lack of concern for any human being other than themselves for the greater good.
Does that just about sum it up?
Absolute nonsense. Dalvik and other Android components have been heavily optimized within the Linux kernel and userspace. Yes, I'm sure parts of Android probably are portable, but considering Linux's appeal both for its available source code and its licensing, why would Google even want to waste enormous resources moving it to another OS?
In other words it's going to do malloc() a big pile of memory, then throw the actual code all over the place, linked together with a helluva lot of jmps and indexes to keep track of them. Yes, I'm sure if every second or third clock cycle is spent leaping over the process's malloced space to fetch the next instruction or the next byte from the symbol table, it may be too complex to actually decompile to reproduce a reasonable representation of the original source code. But as others have pointed out, that level of disassembly isn't necessary for some level of reverse engineering, where you may only be looking for certain things like encryption keys or entry points to insert your own code. In other words, some degree of useful reverse engineering doesn't require reproducing a complete asm file.
But really, if half the byte code is jmps, then any claim that it would run at anything like an unscrambled program is BS. I think what we're talking about here is a program that, as a physical set of binaries and libraries, may be busted up in various complicated ways, but that via the bootstrap process will be reassembled in some sort of sensible order so that your standard operating system and hardware isn't taxed bumping program counters around in mad ways.
If ultimately that's what it is, well one can still presumably map access to kernel and userland objects like system calls, device drivers, shared memory and the like. Yes the byte code may be an insane mess, but if it's going to run the same way more than once, the patterns of its execution are going to show up in how it accesses its resources.
Now if you're talking about software that basically does all its own input output and talks directly to the hardware (in other words, it's basically an operating system in and of itself), then I can see the advantage. Match with some TPM scheme and it would be very hard to the point of possibly being all but impossible to sniff out what it's doing. That's the situation we're at to some degree with UEFI and similar protected bootloaders, and I'm it would be extended to this paradigm so that at every chain of app downloading, installation and execution the ability to get your hands on the executable and the kernel and general system state would be insanely difficult.
That's because VMs really don't try to hide themselves from the guest. While it might be pretty hard to build a VM that did a good enough job to essentially fool software attempting to identify whether its physical or virtualized hardware that it's running on, we have the source for a number of VMs (ie. KVM and Xen) and if this kind of obfuscated software started showing up on the market, I'm sure there would be a much greater push to make a rock solid virtualized environment that mimicked physical hardware with much more fidelity.
Yup, and if you can run the code, no matter how obfuscated. in a controlled environment like a virtual machine, no matter how complicated it may be, its interaction with the virtualized hardware is going to be observable. I guess you could start writing software that sniffs out that it's in a VM, either by looking for paravirtualization or simply for looking for some subset of bugs or limits in the virtualized hardware that one wouldn't find on actual physical hardware, but that's just the better mouse trap vs. the smarter mouse. Besides, other than in very specialized applications, why would anyone invest in general use software that can only run on certain machines.
Yeah, but once they add the GUI interface using VB, it'll be uncrackable!
Yes, the only way this works is with hardware to back it up. But if we're back to effectively using some sort of dongle to execute, well that road has been well-traveled as well.
Even if all the libraries are statically compiled, it's still going to be making system calls. Yes, it's behavior could be very hard to determine, but unless it's a standalone operating system that runs entirely on its own, it's going to be traceable. Even then, one could still run it in a VM. Perhaps harder to get useful information out of, but still...
I see no reason you can't use a VM to accomplish the same damned thing.
If crappy performance is no obstacle, I'm sure you could produce compiled code that is insanely obfuscated. Still, as I said elsewhere, if you can execute it, it can be executed in a debugger and you can watch what it does, and even if it's doing mad long jumps all over its allocated memory, you're going to be able to trace execution. It will betray its functionality.
Unless the software can magically tlel that it's running in a debugger or a sandbox and refuse to execute, it's activity; from stack activity to system calls to memory allocations can be traced.
Yup. At the end of the day, if this is at all useful and the hardware and OSs out there now, it;s still going to have to execute, and if it executes, you can run it through a debugger and watch it.
Heh. No fucking shit. It would be a malware writer's holy grail; software that has no identifiable signature.
I still think it's BS, at least on any kind of processor or operating system we're running now.
I'm sure they can further obfuscate the actual code, but at the end of the day the processor is going to have to run machine code, and one way or the other you can tap the processor's activity to read the "decrypted" code. Beyond that, I imagine the performance penalties involved will be monstrous. Even normal obfuscation techniques have pretty heavy penalties.
Life is full of risks. I suspect more lives could be saved by increasing highway patrols or passing laws requiring rubber tread on bathtubs or increasing funding for CPR training than will be saved by spying on who I talk to on Skype.
Let me turn your question on its head. Is there are any level of surveillance you would be unable to tolerate in the quest for safety?
Indeed. If you're going to the trouble of recording HTTP and SMTP protocol commands, then it's absolutely fucking trivial to grab the entire message or the contents of the web pages in question. I cannot imagine an organization that will happily lie to Congress about what it's doing giving a flying fuck about some restriction on recording just metadata. You can be damned sure they're pulling off copies of all unencrypted TCP and UDP traffic. Maybe they won't retain content for as long as they retain metadata, but I can well imagine them being able to easily store several months or longer worth of unencrypted data. Obviously encrypted data poses a larger problem, but you can be damned sure that if they've sent their boys to Microsoft, Google and any other major handler of data with super-secret orders to give them a network connection, they've got the full co-operation of commercial CAs.
You will notice they only reveal as much as the Guardian and Washington Post has already provided from Snowden's leaks. First, they claimed the program didn't exist, and then they admitted they were doing some things, but it was all very targeted, and now they're admitted that millions of people are being caught in the net due to second and third hand associations to people they're eavesdropping on. I'm sure the next revelations will demonstrate that they are capturing various unencrypted data streams, and indeed even supposedly encrypted ones like Skype. They will admit that, which will ultimately lead us all to realize that the US and its allies are pretty much spying on every human being with any kind of Internet connection.
The age of information freedom is gone. We're just going to have to accept that the governments of democratic states, however good their intentions, have become as much surveillance junkies as the dictatorships the West so believes it is superior to. We will also have to admit that our lawmakers are pathetic weak-kneed capitulators that have knowingly sold us up the river, no matter how much handwringing they'll take part in right now.