From the README:
"Thanks also to Apple for obfuscating the private key in the ROM image, using a
scheme that made the deobfuscation code itself stand out like a flare."
Did anyone care to think what will happen if Microsoft decides to 'fix' their chkdsk.exe so it deletes all these 'corrupted' files with 'corrupted' short filenames?
Why on earth would companies upgrade all of their systems to Vista if it requires them to upgrade the hardware? Vista in itself has no real advantage over XP for corporate use, so the only machines running Vista in the workplace will be the ones that came with it pre-installed.
First of all, this dumbass incompetent nutjob didn't write this code in the first place. It's a real world example of code I happen to have fixed because it turned out not to work on 64-bit.
However, while it is indeed a hack, I would like to challenge you to suggest a better version that: a) is as portable (so no assembly for checking overflow flags that for instance Alpha doesn't have) b) uses only 1 multiplication and a comparison in case of overflow, and 2 multiplications otherwise.
The point is, from a pragmatic point of view, this is a very valid solution that has always worked and produced 100% correct results until 64-bit CPUs came about.
I did a lot of 64-bit cleaning up for the PHP project, and I can tell you that there are more subtle issues that may arise when porting from 32-bit to 64-bit.
One example: on a 32-bit Intel machine, a double is precise enough to distinguish LONG_MAX (the highest representable long) from LONG_MAX+1 (a number that doesn't fit in a long anymore). So for instance, to determine whether a long multiplication has overflowed, you could repeat the same multiplication using doubles and compare the result to (double)LONG_MAX. In contrast, on a 64-bit platform LONG_MAX and LONG_MAX+1 are mapped to the same double representation, so there's no way to do the comparison anymore. As this example involves static casts, it is something the compiler will usually not warn you about.
Another thing to be careful about is passing pointers to variadic functions (eg. sscanf), because usually the compiler doesn't know the expected types, as they are buried in the format string, not in the function prototype.
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From the README:
"Thanks also to Apple for obfuscating the private key in the ROM image, using a
scheme that made the deobfuscation code itself stand out like a flare."
Did anyone care to think what will happen if Microsoft decides to 'fix' their chkdsk.exe so it deletes all these 'corrupted' files with 'corrupted' short filenames?
Why on earth would companies upgrade all of their systems to Vista if it requires them to upgrade the hardware? Vista in itself has no real advantage over XP for corporate use, so the only machines running Vista in the workplace will be the ones that came with it pre-installed.
First of all, this dumbass incompetent nutjob didn't write this code in the first place. It's a real world example of code I happen to have fixed because it turned out not to work on 64-bit.
However, while it is indeed a hack, I would like to challenge you to suggest a better version that:
a) is as portable (so no assembly for checking overflow flags that for instance Alpha doesn't have)
b) uses only 1 multiplication and a comparison in case of overflow, and 2 multiplications otherwise.
The point is, from a pragmatic point of view, this is a very valid solution that has always worked and produced 100% correct results until 64-bit CPUs came about.
I did a lot of 64-bit cleaning up for the PHP project, and I can tell you that there are more subtle issues that may arise when porting from 32-bit to 64-bit.
One example:
on a 32-bit Intel machine, a double is precise enough to distinguish LONG_MAX (the highest representable long) from LONG_MAX+1 (a number that doesn't fit in a long anymore). So for instance, to determine whether a long multiplication has overflowed, you could repeat the same multiplication using doubles and compare the result to (double)LONG_MAX.
In contrast, on a 64-bit platform LONG_MAX and LONG_MAX+1 are mapped to the same double representation, so there's no way to do the comparison anymore.
As this example involves static casts, it is something the compiler will usually not warn you about.
Another thing to be careful about is passing pointers to variadic functions (eg. sscanf), because usually the compiler doesn't know the expected types, as they are buried in the format string, not in the function prototype.