Comment by ctxc
6 hours ago
It's insane, right? Reverse engineering is so much fun, I find myself doing it on random apps so often now
6 hours ago
It's insane, right? Reverse engineering is so much fun, I find myself doing it on random apps so often now
0x Alpha is unlimited free tokens this weekend so I had it take apart the original 8088 PC Elite and reverse it back to original MASM assembler and come up with plausible names for all the functions and data structures and check that it compiles back to byte-perfect original.
Wild!
it's especially fun when you do it yourself, I advise toying around with https://crackmes.one. with time and practice, everything becomes open-source because you can read assembly XD
Not legally, which is the issue. I can "open source" Windows 11 and rip out some of the shittiness, but Microsoft is gonna take issue. If it were MIT licensed that would be a different story, but there isn't enough money for lawyers in the world where it's not.
Reverse engineering is legal in the US. You just can't disseminate the results if it runs afoul of copyright law or patents.
1 reply →
I know enough people for whom this risk is the entire appeal
So what? Just be mindful of what you post on the clearnet. What you're doing is like worrying about the illegality of making sparkler bombs in your backyard IMO.
We're entering an age where doing binary modification on live binaries is not a huge deal. Everything is now open "source"?
What is it called when there's a process that's available to individuals but is long and onerous and cannot be shared among them? Saying the binaries are open source now means that the work of reverse engineering will be repeated exactly in proportion to the number of times it's modified. I would argue on a large scale this is still effectively closed source.
As soon as you can share binary patches (highly illegal of course) we're off to the races.
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I would move the quotes to "open" since the issue of licensing is still left. Although LLM providers have shown that they don't care about copyright so it should go both ways.
Quotes for all of it, it's a closed binary that is transparently user modifiable these days I guess, so "open" "source".