I've been having a silent panic attack for the last 3 days, and I don't really have anyone to talk to that would understand my concern.
I run a small pro audio company, we make guitar pedals and audio effects mostly. My current key objective is building up a processor similar to the Eventide H90, that would compete on having top-notch algorithms for reverb, delay, chorus etc. we already have single-effect pedals on the market that are very successful.
In the past 72 hours I have ONE-SHOT decompiled 3 of my main competitors products, including the Strymon Big Sky. I just... have their award winning algorithms now. Like, I could in theory just stick them in a box and resell them. It took one prompt and 3 hours for opus 5.5 to work that out.
The lexicon 224 then got added. While Claude was prepping It found someone else had already done the same thing 1 weeks earlier and dumped the result on GitHub, so it just stole that code and saved some time. It took all of 20 minutes to do the entire Ursa Major product range.
And yes, I've tested them all - and they all sound phenomenal. I specifically asked Claude to first build an emulator and execute the original firmware/ROM so I could be certain it wasn't just making "something similar" but actually executing the same code. Then I asked it to convert it into a self contained c++ library and compare the result to the emulator.
The problem is, everyone can now do this to my products as well. Basically, anyone with a Claude subscription can now rip of any best-in-class algorithm from any competitor. While I'm not going to do that, I know there are 30 Chinese companies that happily would.
The moat of hardware effects processors has just vanished.
The moat for audio effects but especially guitar effects has never been just the quality of algorithm. Yes I know you and the teams at companies like Strymon and Universal Audio and whatnot have slaved over getting every detail right. But what makes Strymon the go to choice for so many players isn't just the sound you can get out of it. Because you can get those sounds elsewhere now.
The moat a physical pro audio product is its interface and its branding. And I know that's tough to hear especially if you're an engineer but its true. People buy Strymon pedals because they know exactly what they're getting and they know its going to be in a format where if you want to dial in a tone without getting into the weeds of menus you can (but if you need to advanced features you can also do that). If people wanted the cheapest way to get those sounds, they could always hook up to a live VST host rig. But you get Strymon because you know that brand name and you know you're going to get a box that you can twiddle the dials on the floor and yes you are also getting that as close to perfect algorithm as well. The sound is part of Strymon's branding but it isn't all of their branding.
Look at it this way, pretty much every original circuit design in the analog guitar pedal space has been copied, duplicated, sold for pennies on the dollar, modified, whatever. But those companies still exist and do well because their moat has never been the circuit, its the branding.
Anyway, I hope you find some peace in the next few days. Its hard to argue that your moat hasn't shrunk and maybe you're in the process of building up that customer base. You gotta think about the copycats and it sucks, but you always had to do that. Its just harder now.
And, the stability of a hardware instrument or effect is considerably higher than that of a computer with 10s of software pieces (and licensing engines) interacting.
And in live music, this is rather critical; some musicians get it instantly, some need a single gig (even in a rehearsal) with their computer setup going dark or blocked or whatever to get it.
I wrote something similar and decided to wait until the morning before sending. You said it better but I'm posting to hopefully give it more weight.
And don't forget, Behringer has been around and reverse engineering successful products as a business model. And I don't think they are putting anyone out of business because customers people know what they're getting when they buy knock-offs.
Speaking as a hardware engineer, the moat did not vanish. You have simply assumed you were on the right side of the moat this whole time when in reality you dug half a trench and threw a glass of water in it.
If your firmware is open for someone to reverse engineer now, it has always been open. The real moat is firmware security, encryption, secure locked down hardware. Nobody, not even LLMs, can reverse your firmware if they can't obtain a cleartext copy of it.
You must use microcontrollers with security features, encrypted firmware, secure key stores. If you don't, you never had a moat in the first place. Your only security is the belief that it's too much effort to reverse your product. Security through obscurity is the moat that has vanished and everyone has been screaming for decades that this is not secure by any stretch of the imagination.
A moat isn’t a perfect defense. It’s a delay tactic that keeps the enemy from coming right up to your wall and climbing it or breaking it down. While you defend your moat, you whittle down the attackers so even when they do cross it they can be more easily defeated.
Moats and high walls became obsolete when canon fire became common.
Claude isn’t just a faster way to cross the moat, it’s gunpowder, and with it the rules have fundamentally changed.
Firmware security is useless if your product can be bought tested and reverse engineered through multiple trials. So long as you have something that can be understood and used by humans, you have something that can be reverse engineered.
Having the code accessible makes it easier, but just having both input and output is sufficient.
Maybe some of the newer stuff is better, but you're kind of overselling the hardware protection (lol). I'm sure everyone thought RDP1 on the STM32F1xx series was going to stop "bad guys" (or even RDP2, lol) but I was able to do better than Obermaier on firmware recovery of a F103 recently without going to the trouble of doing something like delidding a chip or even undersoldering it. The newer stuff is a little better, but a quarter in the Deepseek machine, some fairly common tools and patience, and even skids will be breaking into your invulnerable firmware fortress. I think the apocalyptic nature of all this just hasn't really sunk in for a lot of EEs or firmware developers.
It was a fun project because it predates DSP chips by a couple years (1978). So there's an 8080 host driving some DSP boards made out of 7400 series chips.
I haven't written it up yet, that part is still hard :)
I paid someone on Upwork to trace the schematics into KiCad. Had LLM agents turn those into Verilog models. Lots of little mistakes had to be found and fixed at this point, it took months...
It seems like agents are a lot better at transcribing and grokking schematics now compared to 6 months ago, so it might be much easier now.
Agree that consequences for the future seem depressing...
Can't help but feel that AI is the killing of the golden goose. We thought it would kill jobs, but it may just end up killing entire industries.
Intellectual property incentivized many and laid many golden eggs, but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
But who knows, maybe imploding the software industry is a good thing. I may lose my house in the process, but I think we could all get back to touching a little more grass.
> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
same reason I spent my entire career so far writing open-source code that anyone can copy ? (it's GPL, but imagine 100% companies actually caring about that). Ideas can't be owned.
Intellectual property is terrible for society on the whole.
You could just as easily argue "why are 200 companies burning through people and natural resources to come up with the exact same thing and then marketing it as different" as you can say "why would anyone create anything without the ability to making oodles of money by restricting imitation".
> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
The same reason I have open sourced every line of code I have written in the last several years, even new inventions. Because it is good for society, and good for my reputation to show what I am capable of which has been very good for my career.
Better to be the one to open source it before someone else does.
The only business model left is convenience tax. Save people time and they give you money.
it will also help with the environment by stopping a lot of forced obsolescence for no reason (apple rolls out a new OS every year, then magically wacom stops supporting perfectly working tablets in their new driver versions)
> why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours
When that happens it shouldn't be forgotten that people (broadly speaking) chose this. AI proponents lit intellectual property on fire out of self-interest.
> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
I think it goes deeper than that, in that the AI era will eventually force us to rethink how we value each other. It used to be economic scarcity: I provide a service that very few people can provide, therefore I make a lot of money (supply and demand.) Now we're moving to a place where most anybody can do anything, so our value system needs to evolve, as well. Instead of valuing scarcity, perhaps we should value personal creativity and self-expression. Kind of like paying money for a concert, or for someone's personal painting, even though you can listen online, or you can just have AI generate the same painting. It comes more from wanting to support people than to supply scarcity-based demand.
I think this idea makes many peoples' eyes roll, but IMO that's a testament to where we are today as a society. Most interactions get reduced to just business transactions without the humanity in it, and that's where our problems come from.
Intellectual property has rarely ever been "the golden goose", despite the anecdotes of the few Henry Fords that exist.
Throughout history, the golden goose has typically been owning capital, and having market reach (see: advertising, the silk road).
No matter how amazing your IP is, if you can't produce it at economically viable scales, and if you can't put it in front of people who will buy it, then you have nothing. So venture capital comes along, buys you out, and takes all your future profits in exchange for the "risk".
On the other side of the coin, there's open source software developers, PhD's publishing papers for free, and your local musicians that like to play at events just for funsies.
I mean, imagine the kind of world we'd live in if medicine were focused strictly on profitable moats instead of open research, and... oh. Right.
Your question presupposes new algorithms must come from someone toiling. But AI will be just as capable at developing new algorithms as ripping off the existing ones, surely?
This was a huge problem before AI due to Amazon and global internet marketplaces. Why spend R&D dollars developing an amazing product when Chinese knockoffs will show up 6 months later? I wonder how many great consumer products don't exist because there's no way to recoup your R&D costs and develop a healthy market.
Imagine if there were no intellectual protections for pharmaceuticals. The government would have to take over R&D.
people keep talking about AI killing this or that, but I feel they will create new industries. 50 years ago new tech can shift industries over decade or so, but AI will shift it in 1/5 or in a year, 2 even 1/10 of the time.
I hope your post history doesn't link back to your company or real identity because you probably violated some TOS and I'm not sure it's smart to name your competitors and openly admit you're thinking about repackaging the code you just stole from them.
I don't care either way but depending on where you live this might get you in trouble
Indeed. I'd like to remind everyone that with LLMs it's increasingly simple to build quite a good profile of someone just from their social media posts.
But that’s a good thing. Instead of someone being able to just lock the knowledge away, now we can all have it. And that means we can make better things.
It sucks if you’re a rent seeker, but I’m enjoying this post-IP world. I don’t care who reads my source code anymore, code is disposable. It’s expertise that matters now.
> It sucks if you’re a rent seeker, but I’m enjoying this post-IP world
Oh yes, this new world is terrible for rent seekers. It's like the kum-bah-yah free software world Stallman might have imagined. Information wants to be free and all. Can't stop the signal. Very counterculture. Like the Adobe clone apps.
Except for the closed SOTA model weights, out of reach hardware, and the resulting $200 subscription rent now paid readily both by anybody trying to create something new, and anybody who wants to rip it off. That particular flavor of rent seeking is booming.
I myself am a "rent-seeker" in an alternative sense of "I seek a way to pay for my own continued shelter via my creative output" and it definitely seems like it's gonna suck for me.
The problem is that many of us seek employment from rent seekers. It's all great in theory, but not fun in the in-between times if you're trying to pay your own rent and find placement and nobody wants to bring anyone new on board because they can't find ways to make it profitable.
If an asset doesn't exist to hold value, how do you "protect" expertise? How do you differentiate it? How do you justify investment if someone else will steal anything of value you create?
For a short while, it's great, but in the long run, it makes it difficult to financially invest in building software with either time or money.
It's fantastic for the rent seeking AI providers. They can squeeze users any which way the want and if anyone so much as utters a peep of complaint, they can be banned for life without recourse.
One of the best quotes about moats, friction and pricing comes from an author:
"I wrote a book and there is an epub version of it. I have the epub version for free on my website. There is also an epub version on Amazon and there is costs $4.
You might think that nobody buys my book because it's available for free.
You would be mistaken. LOTS of people pay for the book on Amazon and almost no one downloads it from my website.
Why?
Very obviously people are lazy and they are willing to pay the $4 to just one click deliver the book to their Kindle."
Everybody's moats have all vanished. It's getting to the point credentialism is people's only remaining leverage: only reason many people still have jobs is they have some professional credential that the AIs legally can't have. Doctors, lawyers, engineers whose signatures matter and who are liable for whatever happens. And even in those cases it's only a matter of time really.
Compute is the only true moat. Ownership of high performance computers will be the deciding factor in the future. Haves and have-nots will be determined by this.
The second one is an 8-line FDN. While the actual 224 used “circle 8” algorithms instead of FDNs (it was Eventide who started using FDNs for reverberation) one can get amazing reverbs from a FDN, e.g. Valhalla Supermassive is a 16-line FDN where the 16 delay line amounts are the only thing that changes between algorithms. I myself have made a good sounding 4-line FDN reverb, and 8 lines was used in one of FreeVerb’s algorithms.
> The moat of hardware effects processors has just vanished.
There was never one to begin with. With a sufficiently good quality generator and a digital oscilloscope one could reverse engineer any kind of DSP - including harmonizers.
The real moat is the same as in every business - customer service, durability, warranty - things like that.
If someone vibecoded a clone of Valve's Steam nothing would change, because the system itself is not the thing that makes their business so valuable.
Then you will compete on different things, i guess. For audio hardware, the physicality and experience of using it is important. Have better knobs, better usability, and the best algorithms!
Also, I guess with agents it should be possible to explore new algorithms more efficiently. You may discover something cool! And yes, anyone can copy it, but you will still have first mover advantage. Also, in music tech brands matter a lot. People love getting stuff from small “artisan” companies.
Do you think Chinese manufactures can't clone the hardware? Do you think they can't provide a premium product/experience? They most certainly can and do.
Just be different. Just create a brand. Oh if only it were that easy!
Isn't that kind of the same like Line6 emulating the exact electric circuits of amps and pedals, or like everyone and their dog is now building and selling Klon clones?
I think guitar effects have been mostly about doing the features the player wants, and marketing/brand/packaging, for a long time.
Brands only matter if there is some value to the brand.
People spend a lot for brands in music hardware because they know that brand cares and invests a lot into the quality of their product. It's not like a handbag where the value is primarily the status of owning something expensive (although there is obviously some of this too).
But if there's no real quality difference anymore people will rightfully ask why they'd pay the extra?
I think a more comparable example here might be SaaS products. People don't buy a branded SaaS product for the status of owning the brand. They just want to know if it will solve the problem they have. And if some AI competitor product can do that thing just as well either for free or half the price, then people won't spend what they used to for software like Photoshop.
I don't really think software was ever the moat with these kinds of products? The moat with hardware products has always been access to electrical engineering talent and access to cheap assembly/manufacturing. And marketing. And the $$ in your pocket to fund all the above without having sales yet.
I have written probably a dozen software synthesizers over the last 20 years, for fun, never profit. I would have preferred those to be hardware products. But I lack all of the above. As do most.
I have worked in several embedded companies. The software that runs on them was often considered to be the least important part of the expense chain despite involving the most amount of total work hours.
Well, reverse-engineers could have done this before, but you didn't pay one $3,000 to do it. You paid Claude $30 or whatever to do it. So all that changed was the cost, and the bar is now a lot higher to make a product people will pay for. Furthermore, no one signaled to the market that there was value there, so no one in China reverse-engineered it for $30 before AI. Makes me wonder if these "award-winning" algorithms are valuable due to prestige alone.
That really must be scary. I'd hope at least in the world of music/audiophilia (where gold plates hdmi cables rule) you could focus on the upper ends of the market? Even if the sound is similar you hopefully will have an audience that appreciated the fit and finish and high quality components. Surely will be a challenge but when I see teardowns from China they almost always cheap out with paper caps and such. And while it may be exhausting perhaps you can turn it to your favor (where IP permits) to increase your product range? Godspeed though!
Already for some years. You can now buy decent metal (enclosure) guitar pedal stompboxes for 5 USD… who can produce for that? The only thing that counts is ideas.
Good for consumers, they were selling that Centaur Klon for 3gs. 3gs for a peddle, what sort of monopoly is that? I'm looking forward to clones. Do i feel bad for them? Yes, initially. But coming from the software side, after the initial shock, i see so much potential now.
The Chinese were already hacking your firmware if it was worth hacking at all. The only thing that's changed is that now you can, too. What's not to like?
Before the Singularity: build good products, offer them at a fair price and support them well, succeed at business.
After the Singularity: build good products, offer them at a fair price and support them well, succeed at business.
People should be aware that whatever they are doing with AI, the company they are paying subscription fees to and who owns the AI will usually know too. Your secrets are now theirs too, to sell to others.
After the Singularity (possibly): build good products, get reverse engineered and copycats offered, nobody wants to buy what they can get for free or have AI make for them, rather ask AI those support questions, forced into different kind of business.
Maybe so, but people don't always buy a product because it's the best possible one, or because they're locked into an ecosystem ("moat"). Think of all the products out there that don't rely on a secret algorithm. How are they successful?
Even so, if you can manage to get a agent into the loop of "change variable > inspect results > do change > repeat", you can replicate everything from server-side game servers to audio effects, as long as you manage to get the data into a format they can either "visually" inspect, or inspect by data. For audio, I've had success replicating synth sounds and effects by giving them MIDI access to analog hardware, spectrograms and a suite of other unix tools.
The tricky part is figuring out the workflow, once that's in place, you can encrypt the protocol itself as much as you want, the output (audio, video, JSON, whatever) has to go somewhere, and that can be captured and replicated.
A lot of the security features on microcontrollers are poorly implemented. Here's an example where someone recovered the encryption key on a consumer device with encrypted firmware: https://garyodernichts.blogspot.com/2024/10/looking-into-nin... . The microcontroller supports firmware encryption with a 128-bit AES key, which gets written to 4 32-bit write-only registers. Because it's split up like this, it's possible to find 1/4 of the key by writing every possible value to one of the registers and checking that the output matches, before repeating with the other 3 registers. This means that the number of possible combinations to check is reduced from (2^128) to (4*(2^32)), which can be brute forced in a few hours.
This is interesting. I don't know if this is just cope, but it makes me think of how the schematics of a Soldano SLO100 are readily available. A true feat of engineering. Anyone could build one because the information is out there. Why don't they?
I know that it's much easier to get JLC to make a board and then flash some stolen firmware on it than it is to build a tube amplifier, but musicians are weird creatures.
All I know is, I would rather be in the before times.
Seems "information wants to be free" wins yet again. To bad we don't have any strong political leaders in the world that could run on such platform, I guess in 2-3 decades the tide will start turning the other way again.
everybody cloned stuff before. You keep your clients because you offer more than the lowest available price: the human touch (support, design, quality, problem solving)
LLMs only appear to do that, if they do it effectively is because you can.
Basically, AI has turned everything into open-source. People are likely to not buy your product because: (1) they can get it for free (2) ask AI to reverse engineer whatever you put out (3) they have no money (as out of work or AI putting them out of work soon).
The only winner (kind of), is the AI companies, with "token addicts" and subscription fees. But even that is in doubt, because of the data center debt[1][2] many are in and artificially low prices (to create addicts).
Unless laws are put up quickly to protect IP, which is doubtful (as courts and politicians are mostly clueless about technology), this has become the new weird reality.
[1] https://archive.ph/wWY2g
(Investors dump data centre bonds as AI borrowers face ‘Darwin moment’)
Protect IP from what? The fundamentals of the situation have not changed. The only difference now is that the models are doing the work.
Replace 'models' with 'humans', and you get bog-standard RE. The models just accelerated the timeline where this scenario would've happened.
The solution you propose already exists in its primitive form: It's called Section 1201 of the DMCA. What you're asking for extends that protection to the whole program, not just the DRM, and thus killing all of reverse engineering altogether.
------
Copyright as it exists is no different than real estate: Landowners extracting rent from properties they own, in exchange for promises on routine maintenance & upgrades.
What we have now is a machine that can look at a building & remake it to at least 90+% similarity, given enough iterations.
The only solution is reputation and selling to the public domain, instead of to individuals:
if people like your stuff, you'll have a reputation because of what you made in the past, then you can offer to release your next project to the public domain if some crowdfunding goal is met.
That is possible, crowdfund the money up front based on reputation or the buzz surrounding the idea. The more popular something is, however, the more likely it will become a target for copycats.
Part of the issue is that people can feed the idea, descriptions, and pictures into the AI. Thus create knockoffs, for their crowdfund or as the basis for their similar software.
If the original person ever actually releases software, they can buy a copy and feed to the AI, to then beef up the features in the previously created similar software. The difference between the original and copycats can be few to just about none.
Unless the original creator is willing to fight it out in court, there is little they can do about the situation. Updates made in the original, can be "transferred" to the copycats. AI makes the speed and quality orders of magnitude higher.
I reverse engineered almost all electronics I own. Does it have USB that does more than just charging? Connect it to a computer and let AI play with it. Unless it's heavily secured like a phone that's pretty much all you need to do. Making some old remote work with various devices? Simple. Dumping the entire state of Rodecaster and controlling it in any you want with software, or maybe a remote? Why not. Old printer no longer works with MacOS 27? Ask for new drivers and now it does.
The printer 'debugging' was one of the funniest and most WTF situations I've been in lately. I used Claude for the drivers and was essentially used by it as a meat sock to diagnose what's happening. Was the text on each line progressively less visible, ie did grayscale work? How about quality between page 1 and 2, the first one should be lower DPI. Ok now unload the paper so I can see the error and add some handling for it. Good, now load paper again we'll check the duplex.
If you are reasonably familiar with computers, it really is as simple as pointing a strong model at a device and burning some tokens. Feels like a fever dream, especially since I had very little idea about anything that has to do with hardware.
Just release it under a pseudonym. The worst they will do is force it off GitHub! Don't redistribute the firmware files if you're really concerned. I am also sort of struggling with this idea so I get where you're coming from.
> Every device you buy wants you install an app on your phone. Not if I can help it.
That sounds interesting. What's the usual approach, install the app in some emulator or something, and ask your agent to reverse engineer it? Or is the setup for the agent to work simpler than that?
Yes be able to give new life and maintain compatibility with old hardware and/or unsupported OSes is one of the recent positive aspects of agents with frontier models!
Also managed to bring back compatibility old printer with Linux and even unsupported one working only over bluetooth!
Before this era, you could imagine how it could work but would have rarely taken the time to do this grunt work.
Now you ask, wait for a few minutes, do so meat proxy integration testing, iterate a few times and here you go.
I had an obscure Alcatel modem/router laying around with undocumented hardware, where even the mainboard's CPU/SoC serial etc didn't return any results from any search engines.
Soldered UART pins on it, plugged my USB adapter into my computer, then asked an agent to reverse engineer the firmware blob. Took DeepSeek v4.1 flash around an hour to get a full OpenWRT build-and-flash pipeline up and running, using an isolated podman build container and everything.
The outdated OEM Kernel made it easy to identify the SoC hardware. drivers and proprietary Wi-Fi and Bluetooth driver mods (not really legal btw, because they "conveniently forgot" to publish GPL'd source code). Driver mods were successfully reversed through analyzing the .so and .ko files with frida in another podman container.
Overall took me less than half a day to do all this, and now I have OpenWRT running on that device, compiled from source with the upstream modern kernel.
To me, observing all that, and how quickly it found encryption keys, signing mechanisms, encodings, binary formats, instruction sets, disassembling it etc by just looking at the hexdumps ... this would have taken me weeks if not months.
And now comes the kicker, all that cost me 0.86$
AI and reverse engineering is like tap water now. There's no reason to not consider using it, because it's so accessible. There's just absolutely no point in proprietary hardware and software anymore.
My current project after this: I've soldered the UART pins to a proprietary Xiaomi smartphone I had laying around, and I'm currently letting it reverse engineer the baseband firmware. Let's see where this ends up ...
What if someone made an AI that reversed engineered hardware, then looked up if any patents were infringed upon, then emailed the owners of said patents?
That would be very shitty.
Why would someone do that? To frustrate the patent system, or AI.
AI is incredible at making things viable (time-wise) that weren't before.
As an example, to show off my LLM-reverse-engineered-hardware project: a user-space driver and software for an old FireWire to USB box, the manufacturer drivers for which were last updated in 2006 and don't really work anymore on modern OSes (and never worked on Mac). Firewire these days in general is also incredibly buggy (needing legacy drivers for PCIe cards, software that wasn't updated since 2006, etc).
With a modern app, even something written in a few days, is already so much more pleasant to use and less buggy, than _all_ the old options that people were using before.
The hardware is quite unique because it's the only widely sold device(-family) that had a DV (FireWire/1394) connector for connecting mid-2000s camcorders, allowing you to transfer video via USB on computers that didn't (don't) have a FireWire port. And internally it works by packing the digital DV video stream into USB, without converting it, so you get the raw, full-quality video data as it was on the tape, the same you'd get it with a "real" firewire setup.
I guess the downside is that if people find out that this old, unique hardware is useful now, it will become expensive and hard to find.
As an aside: I tried using claude to write GTK4 applications in december 2025/january 2026 and it was awful at it, barely even helpful. Then in September it's writing great gtk4 apps with barely any prompting.
The capability ceiling of models in general has risen massively in not even one year. Back in 2025, I also found them to generally be a net-negative expense of time and effort. I wouldn't universally make the same claim today.
I have KEF LSX II LT speakers on my desk. They sound wonderful, but they have this annoying issue in which waking them from standby plays REALLY LOUD music for a second or two before settling on the correct volume. It's jarring, and it's a widespread issue.
In a few hours yesterday, I built a macOS menu bar app [0] that ramps up the volume when the USB output is triggered. This is not reverse engineering but an effective workaround.
I am tempted to try to reverse engineer the speakers and see if I could fix them myself. But 1) I have a feeling they have security features enabled and 2) I would rather not brick this rather expensive pair of speakers.
A few weeks ago, I had Claude develop a CUPS driver running over a Bluetooth connection for the mini photo printer Canon Zoemini 2: works great on Linux (NixOS), even though Canon only bothered to only support smartphones, never desktops!
So, in theory, I could just reverse-engineer the old Wacom tablet I have with no driver support for the M-series processor and build me a driver so I can continue using it? (there is a driver but it seems it will stop working with the next OS update).
Oh man, I did fall into that rabbit hole.
I took my old mp3 player Onn-x5 and just finished a custom firmware for it.
Explore and reverse engineer it just from connecting it to my computer.
I work in the courtrooms sometimes for some lawsuits and we use the ATEM Mini Pro to switch between ipads and pcs for both defense and plaintiffs sides.
Normally, when I'm running tech, the switcher is right next to me, easy peasy.
But recently I've been in cases where I have to sit far away due to the court layouts.
They can be controlled over network, but our setup requires that the devices have no internet connection, or rather, adding an internet connection to the system is at best impractical. However, there is wireless networking involved for some of the apps.
I realized that I could connect my phone to the wireless networking, plus in the Atem Mini Pro to that same network over ethernet, and control the Atem remotely.
I checked Blackmagic's website, and even though they offer an SDK and pretty decent software for controlling the devices, there are no apps to control them.
Talked to chatgpt and 20 minutes later on their $20/m plan I had an app that can find the device on the network, connect to it, switch between the inputs, turn on and off the various audio functions, and fade to black/unfade all from my android phone.
I still had to download android studio and build the app but it was not difficult at all. Extremely niche use case, very specific solution.
Instead of targeting extremely ancient hardware that almost no-one uses, what if you got Claude to reverse engineer useful closed source hardware and software?
Both Apple and Nvidia are the most hostile and have the most locked-down heavy hardware and software and now Claude can reverse engineer and build a driver to get Nvidia GPUs working on Intel Macs [0] and it can unlock the ability to pair an Apple watch with Android phones. [1]
Now it makes even more sense to target reverse engineering CUDA, Nvidia firmware blobs and Apple software to finally make them run better on Linux without waiting for those vendors to fix their bugs or deliberately slowing their own hardware down.
Not that simple but yes, even as a decades long "macOSX" fan I would love to see the Mac finally unshackled. Maybe Apple hardware could become a bit more like the Apple II era again after all? Asahi up to latest hardware generation; fully reverse engineered drivers down to the Metal... it would be a dream.
All of those things already got reversed in the past. You just haven't heard of them because they don't really matter without you know, the support, software updates, the ecosystem and so on. What use do you have from one specific version of nvcc or the fw for one specific version of a watch? Your work will be obsolete with the next watch, that's why people haven't bothered so far.
Of course if it's cheaper, someone might, but the real barrier is really the whole first-party support, it's not the technical stuff.
Because with enough time "the market" reverse engineers everything that has mainstream adoption, but only you are going to reverse engineer something that only you care about
I've already done this (more or less). Rolled a fully custom from scratch written stack. I've gotten Darwin to work as a standalone kernel with a GNU-like interface on top. Planning on porting the full MacOS environment when I find the time.
Because, frankly, older hardware is just much simpler and also has much more widely available information about it. It’s just easier. Not that you can’t try, but it’s going to be harder.
> only to discover that in the time between me giving up and then trying again someone had committed code to SANE to support the scanner already…..it happens sometimes.
One of the best things you can do in these situations is to actually audit the code that was contributed against the code you have. If you have more than was contributed, you could potentially still make a contribution of what's missing, against the structure of the existing contribution.
> I decided to buy a negative photo scanner and found that the Plustek 8200i was supported under Linux so I bought that. Only to discover that the chipset in the scanner had changed to one that wasn’t supported under Linux anymore
The author has been a free software author, contributor and active community member to many projects including GNOME, Freedesktop, GStreamer/Pipewire, and (if I recall correctly) LibreOffice for decades.
Software is in the same boat. Licenses and obfuscation never really protected anything - it was just too much work/effort to copy. Now it's one prompt..
I'm sure they're also using AI to build those infotainment systems these days, so I don't think the stability / usability somehow magically comes from the use of AI.
Probably it does come from the manufacturer not caring and just releasing the bare minimum, whereas hobby developers can, and want to, spend more time on getting things perfect.
Yeah I’m rushing to reverse engineer some of my favorite games now when I have tokens to burn. Document the addresses, functions, break the encryption, unpack all assets. There’s no way opus keeps this functionality for long. Then I can have a dumber model continue the work or a smarter model with guardrails reassemble the pre-extracted logic and assets.
A patent on a widget does not prevent me from building that exact widget.
In fact, a good patent will tell me exactly how to make that widget.
All a patent does is prevent me from building and selling that widget without getting permission from the patent holder, and even then, the patent holder has to discover that I am selling their widgets and possibly sue me to stop me or extract their fair portion of the proceeds if I do not agree to a preliminary settlement.
I've been having a silent panic attack for the last 3 days, and I don't really have anyone to talk to that would understand my concern.
I run a small pro audio company, we make guitar pedals and audio effects mostly. My current key objective is building up a processor similar to the Eventide H90, that would compete on having top-notch algorithms for reverb, delay, chorus etc. we already have single-effect pedals on the market that are very successful.
In the past 72 hours I have ONE-SHOT decompiled 3 of my main competitors products, including the Strymon Big Sky. I just... have their award winning algorithms now. Like, I could in theory just stick them in a box and resell them. It took one prompt and 3 hours for opus 5.5 to work that out.
The lexicon 224 then got added. While Claude was prepping It found someone else had already done the same thing 1 weeks earlier and dumped the result on GitHub, so it just stole that code and saved some time. It took all of 20 minutes to do the entire Ursa Major product range.
And yes, I've tested them all - and they all sound phenomenal. I specifically asked Claude to first build an emulator and execute the original firmware/ROM so I could be certain it wasn't just making "something similar" but actually executing the same code. Then I asked it to convert it into a self contained c++ library and compare the result to the emulator.
The problem is, everyone can now do this to my products as well. Basically, anyone with a Claude subscription can now rip of any best-in-class algorithm from any competitor. While I'm not going to do that, I know there are 30 Chinese companies that happily would.
The moat of hardware effects processors has just vanished.
The moat for audio effects but especially guitar effects has never been just the quality of algorithm. Yes I know you and the teams at companies like Strymon and Universal Audio and whatnot have slaved over getting every detail right. But what makes Strymon the go to choice for so many players isn't just the sound you can get out of it. Because you can get those sounds elsewhere now.
The moat a physical pro audio product is its interface and its branding. And I know that's tough to hear especially if you're an engineer but its true. People buy Strymon pedals because they know exactly what they're getting and they know its going to be in a format where if you want to dial in a tone without getting into the weeds of menus you can (but if you need to advanced features you can also do that). If people wanted the cheapest way to get those sounds, they could always hook up to a live VST host rig. But you get Strymon because you know that brand name and you know you're going to get a box that you can twiddle the dials on the floor and yes you are also getting that as close to perfect algorithm as well. The sound is part of Strymon's branding but it isn't all of their branding.
Look at it this way, pretty much every original circuit design in the analog guitar pedal space has been copied, duplicated, sold for pennies on the dollar, modified, whatever. But those companies still exist and do well because their moat has never been the circuit, its the branding.
Anyway, I hope you find some peace in the next few days. Its hard to argue that your moat hasn't shrunk and maybe you're in the process of building up that customer base. You gotta think about the copycats and it sucks, but you always had to do that. Its just harder now.
And, the stability of a hardware instrument or effect is considerably higher than that of a computer with 10s of software pieces (and licensing engines) interacting.
And in live music, this is rather critical; some musicians get it instantly, some need a single gig (even in a rehearsal) with their computer setup going dark or blocked or whatever to get it.
I wrote something similar and decided to wait until the morning before sending. You said it better but I'm posting to hopefully give it more weight.
And don't forget, Behringer has been around and reverse engineering successful products as a business model. And I don't think they are putting anyone out of business because customers people know what they're getting when they buy knock-offs.
3 replies →
Speaking as a hardware engineer, the moat did not vanish. You have simply assumed you were on the right side of the moat this whole time when in reality you dug half a trench and threw a glass of water in it.
If your firmware is open for someone to reverse engineer now, it has always been open. The real moat is firmware security, encryption, secure locked down hardware. Nobody, not even LLMs, can reverse your firmware if they can't obtain a cleartext copy of it.
You must use microcontrollers with security features, encrypted firmware, secure key stores. If you don't, you never had a moat in the first place. Your only security is the belief that it's too much effort to reverse your product. Security through obscurity is the moat that has vanished and everyone has been screaming for decades that this is not secure by any stretch of the imagination.
I think you are torturing the analogy.
A moat isn’t a perfect defense. It’s a delay tactic that keeps the enemy from coming right up to your wall and climbing it or breaking it down. While you defend your moat, you whittle down the attackers so even when they do cross it they can be more easily defeated.
Moats and high walls became obsolete when canon fire became common.
Claude isn’t just a faster way to cross the moat, it’s gunpowder, and with it the rules have fundamentally changed.
Firmware security is useless if your product can be bought tested and reverse engineered through multiple trials. So long as you have something that can be understood and used by humans, you have something that can be reverse engineered.
Having the code accessible makes it easier, but just having both input and output is sufficient.
13 replies →
Maybe some of the newer stuff is better, but you're kind of overselling the hardware protection (lol). I'm sure everyone thought RDP1 on the STM32F1xx series was going to stop "bad guys" (or even RDP2, lol) but I was able to do better than Obermaier on firmware recovery of a F103 recently without going to the trouble of doing something like delidding a chip or even undersoldering it. The newer stuff is a little better, but a quarter in the Deepseek machine, some fairly common tools and patience, and even skids will be breaking into your invulnerable firmware fortress. I think the apocalyptic nature of all this just hasn't really sunk in for a lot of EEs or firmware developers.
1 reply →
Reverse engineering of audio effects can be done completely independently of the hardware that generates it.
7 replies →
Or just make solid hardware and leave it open for people to hack on. The argins aren't as big but it's honest work.
They'll just "distil" your hardware from input/outputs.
1 reply →
I'm guessing the Lexicon was mine: https://github.com/joelanders/reflecticon-224
It was a fun project because it predates DSP chips by a couple years (1978). So there's an 8080 host driving some DSP boards made out of 7400 series chips.
Bio of the designer with a photo of him prototyping it: https://www.davidgriesinger.com/biographies/
I haven't written it up yet, that part is still hard :)
I paid someone on Upwork to trace the schematics into KiCad. Had LLM agents turn those into Verilog models. Lots of little mistakes had to be found and fixed at this point, it took months...
It seems like agents are a lot better at transcribing and grokking schematics now compared to 6 months ago, so it might be much easier now.
Agree that consequences for the future seem depressing...
There's also another complete reconstruction of a somewhat newer device in https://github.com/reverse32159/reverb-80
I haven't seen any other full description of the Lexichip online yet.
Would you know if the Bricasti is possible to approach this way? I have a unit.
Can't help but feel that AI is the killing of the golden goose. We thought it would kill jobs, but it may just end up killing entire industries.
Intellectual property incentivized many and laid many golden eggs, but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
But who knows, maybe imploding the software industry is a good thing. I may lose my house in the process, but I think we could all get back to touching a little more grass.
> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
same reason I spent my entire career so far writing open-source code that anyone can copy ? (it's GPL, but imagine 100% companies actually caring about that). Ideas can't be owned.
Intellectual property is terrible for society on the whole.
You could just as easily argue "why are 200 companies burning through people and natural resources to come up with the exact same thing and then marketing it as different" as you can say "why would anyone create anything without the ability to making oodles of money by restricting imitation".
12 replies →
> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
The same reason I have open sourced every line of code I have written in the last several years, even new inventions. Because it is good for society, and good for my reputation to show what I am capable of which has been very good for my career.
Better to be the one to open source it before someone else does.
The only business model left is convenience tax. Save people time and they give you money.
8 replies →
it will also help with the environment by stopping a lot of forced obsolescence for no reason (apple rolls out a new OS every year, then magically wacom stops supporting perfectly working tablets in their new driver versions)
1 reply →
> why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours
When that happens it shouldn't be forgotten that people (broadly speaking) chose this. AI proponents lit intellectual property on fire out of self-interest.
7 replies →
> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
I think it goes deeper than that, in that the AI era will eventually force us to rethink how we value each other. It used to be economic scarcity: I provide a service that very few people can provide, therefore I make a lot of money (supply and demand.) Now we're moving to a place where most anybody can do anything, so our value system needs to evolve, as well. Instead of valuing scarcity, perhaps we should value personal creativity and self-expression. Kind of like paying money for a concert, or for someone's personal painting, even though you can listen online, or you can just have AI generate the same painting. It comes more from wanting to support people than to supply scarcity-based demand.
I think this idea makes many peoples' eyes roll, but IMO that's a testament to where we are today as a society. Most interactions get reduced to just business transactions without the humanity in it, and that's where our problems come from.
23 replies →
Intellectual property has rarely ever been "the golden goose", despite the anecdotes of the few Henry Fords that exist.
Throughout history, the golden goose has typically been owning capital, and having market reach (see: advertising, the silk road).
No matter how amazing your IP is, if you can't produce it at economically viable scales, and if you can't put it in front of people who will buy it, then you have nothing. So venture capital comes along, buys you out, and takes all your future profits in exchange for the "risk".
On the other side of the coin, there's open source software developers, PhD's publishing papers for free, and your local musicians that like to play at events just for funsies.
I mean, imagine the kind of world we'd live in if medicine were focused strictly on profitable moats instead of open research, and... oh. Right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin
Your question presupposes new algorithms must come from someone toiling. But AI will be just as capable at developing new algorithms as ripping off the existing ones, surely?
This was a huge problem before AI due to Amazon and global internet marketplaces. Why spend R&D dollars developing an amazing product when Chinese knockoffs will show up 6 months later? I wonder how many great consumer products don't exist because there's no way to recoup your R&D costs and develop a healthy market.
Imagine if there were no intellectual protections for pharmaceuticals. The government would have to take over R&D.
> but it may just end up killing entire industries.
as did the internet before it
> but it may just end up killing entire industries.
how many record companies have been put out of business by piracy?
people keep talking about AI killing this or that, but I feel they will create new industries. 50 years ago new tech can shift industries over decade or so, but AI will shift it in 1/5 or in a year, 2 even 1/10 of the time.
Or you do as OpenAI & Co. do and just rent out a service
IDK about the grass, bro, I've mostly just seen a lot of pavement since I lost my SWE job
Patents will become the norm with AI. Of course the average joe will not be able to afford it.
2 replies →
I hope your post history doesn't link back to your company or real identity because you probably violated some TOS and I'm not sure it's smart to name your competitors and openly admit you're thinking about repackaging the code you just stole from them.
I don't care either way but depending on where you live this might get you in trouble
Indeed. I'd like to remind everyone that with LLMs it's increasingly simple to build quite a good profile of someone just from their social media posts.
But that’s a good thing. Instead of someone being able to just lock the knowledge away, now we can all have it. And that means we can make better things.
It sucks if you’re a rent seeker, but I’m enjoying this post-IP world. I don’t care who reads my source code anymore, code is disposable. It’s expertise that matters now.
> It sucks if you’re a rent seeker, but I’m enjoying this post-IP world
Oh yes, this new world is terrible for rent seekers. It's like the kum-bah-yah free software world Stallman might have imagined. Information wants to be free and all. Can't stop the signal. Very counterculture. Like the Adobe clone apps.
Except for the closed SOTA model weights, out of reach hardware, and the resulting $200 subscription rent now paid readily both by anybody trying to create something new, and anybody who wants to rip it off. That particular flavor of rent seeking is booming.
I myself am a "rent-seeker" in an alternative sense of "I seek a way to pay for my own continued shelter via my creative output" and it definitely seems like it's gonna suck for me.
2 replies →
The problem is that many of us seek employment from rent seekers. It's all great in theory, but not fun in the in-between times if you're trying to pay your own rent and find placement and nobody wants to bring anyone new on board because they can't find ways to make it profitable.
2 replies →
If an asset doesn't exist to hold value, how do you "protect" expertise? How do you differentiate it? How do you justify investment if someone else will steal anything of value you create?
For a short while, it's great, but in the long run, it makes it difficult to financially invest in building software with either time or money.
> Instead of someone being able to just lock the knowledge away, now we can all have it
Uhh I think you're missing a tiny 3 trillion dollar detail. I understand though, something that small and inconsequential is easy to overlook.
1 reply →
It's fantastic for the rent seeking AI providers. They can squeeze users any which way the want and if anyone so much as utters a peep of complaint, they can be banned for life without recourse.
One of the best quotes about moats, friction and pricing comes from an author:
"I wrote a book and there is an epub version of it. I have the epub version for free on my website. There is also an epub version on Amazon and there is costs $4.
You might think that nobody buys my book because it's available for free.
You would be mistaken. LOTS of people pay for the book on Amazon and almost no one downloads it from my website.
Why?
Very obviously people are lazy and they are willing to pay the $4 to just one click deliver the book to their Kindle."
Everybody's moats have all vanished. It's getting to the point credentialism is people's only remaining leverage: only reason many people still have jobs is they have some professional credential that the AIs legally can't have. Doctors, lawyers, engineers whose signatures matter and who are liable for whatever happens. And even in those cases it's only a matter of time really.
Compute is the only true moat. Ownership of high performance computers will be the deciding factor in the future. Haves and have-nots will be determined by this.
For people looking for the Lexicon 224 which supposedly is on GitHub, here are two possible links:
https://github.com/joelanders/reflecticon-224
This one needs actual 224 ROMs to run, but we also have...
https://github.com/filipeborato/borato-224
The second one is an 8-line FDN. While the actual 224 used “circle 8” algorithms instead of FDNs (it was Eventide who started using FDNs for reverberation) one can get amazing reverbs from a FDN, e.g. Valhalla Supermassive is a 16-line FDN where the 16 delay line amounts are the only thing that changes between algorithms. I myself have made a good sounding 4-line FDN reverb, and 8 lines was used in one of FreeVerb’s algorithms.
> The moat of hardware effects processors has just vanished.
There was never one to begin with. With a sufficiently good quality generator and a digital oscilloscope one could reverse engineer any kind of DSP - including harmonizers.
The real moat is the same as in every business - customer service, durability, warranty - things like that.
If someone vibecoded a clone of Valve's Steam nothing would change, because the system itself is not the thing that makes their business so valuable.
Then you will compete on different things, i guess. For audio hardware, the physicality and experience of using it is important. Have better knobs, better usability, and the best algorithms!
Also, I guess with agents it should be possible to explore new algorithms more efficiently. You may discover something cool! And yes, anyone can copy it, but you will still have first mover advantage. Also, in music tech brands matter a lot. People love getting stuff from small “artisan” companies.
Do you think Chinese manufactures can't clone the hardware? Do you think they can't provide a premium product/experience? They most certainly can and do.
Just be different. Just create a brand. Oh if only it were that easy!
3 replies →
Don't worry, you'll be making hardware pedals with webassembly and remote attestation soon enough, and we'll be back to the status quo.
Why don’t you do as much of this as possible for the next six months and make the best product you can.
It sounds like it will go faster if you use coding agents.
Anyone copying you will have to do the same.
Perhaps spend a month with your agent making it harder for other agents to reverse engineer?
Isn't that kind of the same like Line6 emulating the exact electric circuits of amps and pedals, or like everyone and their dog is now building and selling Klon clones?
I think guitar effects have been mostly about doing the features the player wants, and marketing/brand/packaging, for a long time.
Brands only matter if there is some value to the brand.
People spend a lot for brands in music hardware because they know that brand cares and invests a lot into the quality of their product. It's not like a handbag where the value is primarily the status of owning something expensive (although there is obviously some of this too).
But if there's no real quality difference anymore people will rightfully ask why they'd pay the extra?
I think a more comparable example here might be SaaS products. People don't buy a branded SaaS product for the status of owning the brand. They just want to know if it will solve the problem they have. And if some AI competitor product can do that thing just as well either for free or half the price, then people won't spend what they used to for software like Photoshop.
It'll be kind of nice that DSP guitar pedals will be cloneable like old-school analog guitar pedals.
I don't really think software was ever the moat with these kinds of products? The moat with hardware products has always been access to electrical engineering talent and access to cheap assembly/manufacturing. And marketing. And the $$ in your pocket to fund all the above without having sales yet.
I have written probably a dozen software synthesizers over the last 20 years, for fun, never profit. I would have preferred those to be hardware products. But I lack all of the above. As do most.
I have worked in several embedded companies. The software that runs on them was often considered to be the least important part of the expense chain despite involving the most amount of total work hours.
[dead]
Well, reverse-engineers could have done this before, but you didn't pay one $3,000 to do it. You paid Claude $30 or whatever to do it. So all that changed was the cost, and the bar is now a lot higher to make a product people will pay for. Furthermore, no one signaled to the market that there was value there, so no one in China reverse-engineered it for $30 before AI. Makes me wonder if these "award-winning" algorithms are valuable due to prestige alone.
That really must be scary. I'd hope at least in the world of music/audiophilia (where gold plates hdmi cables rule) you could focus on the upper ends of the market? Even if the sound is similar you hopefully will have an audience that appreciated the fit and finish and high quality components. Surely will be a challenge but when I see teardowns from China they almost always cheap out with paper caps and such. And while it may be exhausting perhaps you can turn it to your favor (where IP permits) to increase your product range? Godspeed though!
Already for some years. You can now buy decent metal (enclosure) guitar pedal stompboxes for 5 USD… who can produce for that? The only thing that counts is ideas.
From "Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49062870 :
> Neural Amp Modeler (is open source)
> JUCE on embedded, Rust DSP
> A board of guitar pedals with IDK one USB-A and a USB-C adapter with OSC and MIDI support; USB MIDI trololo pedals
There are multiple products like this on Amazon+Shopify w/ linked inventory now
Good for consumers, they were selling that Centaur Klon for 3gs. 3gs for a peddle, what sort of monopoly is that? I'm looking forward to clones. Do i feel bad for them? Yes, initially. But coming from the software side, after the initial shock, i see so much potential now.
The Klon was never $3k new.
That happened on the used market after they were no longer manufactured, and the original was seen on a few idolized players' boards.
And there have been Klon clones for ages, including a follow on version by the original designer.
The Chinese were already hacking your firmware if it was worth hacking at all. The only thing that's changed is that now you can, too. What's not to like?
Before the Singularity: build good products, offer them at a fair price and support them well, succeed at business.
After the Singularity: build good products, offer them at a fair price and support them well, succeed at business.
People should be aware that whatever they are doing with AI, the company they are paying subscription fees to and who owns the AI will usually know too. Your secrets are now theirs too, to sell to others.
After the Singularity (possibly): build good products, get reverse engineered and copycats offered, nobody wants to buy what they can get for free or have AI make for them, rather ask AI those support questions, forced into different kind of business.
1 reply →
I guess patents are becoming more important now ... :(
They never weren't important. What's important now is being prepared to act on them, which is expensive.
The only marketing strategy left will be that of "authenticity" and "human made".
Maybe so, but people don't always buy a product because it's the best possible one, or because they're locked into an ecosystem ("moat"). Think of all the products out there that don't rely on a secret algorithm. How are they successful?
No product is now safe. Everything from photoshop to office suite to harvey are being reverse engineered.
Out of curiosity, did you just use vanilla Claude Code with Opus 5.5, or did you use this: https://github.com/morluto/rea?
One solution is to encrypt the firmware and keep the decryption keys on the hardware side, preferably in something that’s tamper resistant.
It’s not ideal. It has serious drawbacks. It makes development and updates a PITA. But it does make it much harder to decompile your firmware.
Even so, if you can manage to get a agent into the loop of "change variable > inspect results > do change > repeat", you can replicate everything from server-side game servers to audio effects, as long as you manage to get the data into a format they can either "visually" inspect, or inspect by data. For audio, I've had success replicating synth sounds and effects by giving them MIDI access to analog hardware, spectrograms and a suite of other unix tools.
The tricky part is figuring out the workflow, once that's in place, you can encrypt the protocol itself as much as you want, the output (audio, video, JSON, whatever) has to go somewhere, and that can be captured and replicated.
A lot of the security features on microcontrollers are poorly implemented. Here's an example where someone recovered the encryption key on a consumer device with encrypted firmware: https://garyodernichts.blogspot.com/2024/10/looking-into-nin... . The microcontroller supports firmware encryption with a 128-bit AES key, which gets written to 4 32-bit write-only registers. Because it's split up like this, it's possible to find 1/4 of the key by writing every possible value to one of the registers and checking that the output matches, before repeating with the other 3 registers. This means that the number of possible combinations to check is reduced from (2^128) to (4*(2^32)), which can be brute forced in a few hours.
1 reply →
Or just ask Claude what is the best way to protect your IP. It should know its capabilities.
1 reply →
This is interesting. I don't know if this is just cope, but it makes me think of how the schematics of a Soldano SLO100 are readily available. A true feat of engineering. Anyone could build one because the information is out there. Why don't they?
I know that it's much easier to get JLC to make a board and then flash some stolen firmware on it than it is to build a tube amplifier, but musicians are weird creatures.
All I know is, I would rather be in the before times.
Shocking that the current guitar market is so big, I wouldn't panic over a small project like this since it's still projected to grow
Maths are just maths again!
Enough with patents, NDAs and trade secrets.
I wonder what the downstream effects of that will be. I imagine we may see some big lawsuits soon, meant to scare off the RE trend.
Seems "information wants to be free" wins yet again. To bad we don't have any strong political leaders in the world that could run on such platform, I guess in 2-3 decades the tide will start turning the other way again.
Philosophically RMS won in the end.
4 replies →
everybody cloned stuff before. You keep your clients because you offer more than the lowest available price: the human touch (support, design, quality, problem solving)
LLMs only appear to do that, if they do it effectively is because you can.
Basically, AI has turned everything into open-source. People are likely to not buy your product because: (1) they can get it for free (2) ask AI to reverse engineer whatever you put out (3) they have no money (as out of work or AI putting them out of work soon).
The only winner (kind of), is the AI companies, with "token addicts" and subscription fees. But even that is in doubt, because of the data center debt[1][2] many are in and artificially low prices (to create addicts).
Unless laws are put up quickly to protect IP, which is doubtful (as courts and politicians are mostly clueless about technology), this has become the new weird reality.
[1] https://archive.ph/wWY2g (Investors dump data centre bonds as AI borrowers face ‘Darwin moment’)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KChHY1kDOFQ (AI Bubble | Ed Zitron)
> Unless laws are put up quickly to protect IP
Protect IP from what? The fundamentals of the situation have not changed. The only difference now is that the models are doing the work.
Replace 'models' with 'humans', and you get bog-standard RE. The models just accelerated the timeline where this scenario would've happened.
The solution you propose already exists in its primitive form: It's called Section 1201 of the DMCA. What you're asking for extends that protection to the whole program, not just the DRM, and thus killing all of reverse engineering altogether.
------
Copyright as it exists is no different than real estate: Landowners extracting rent from properties they own, in exchange for promises on routine maintenance & upgrades.
What we have now is a machine that can look at a building & remake it to at least 90+% similarity, given enough iterations.
And we're discussing about banning the machine.
1 reply →
How will the economy even work in this case?!
Man this thread is jam packed with sociopaths who don't feel empathy.
That sucks that your business and mental well-being are threatened by AI. It's a scary time for everyone. I hope you figure it out.
You should talk to a lawyer. And not post something like this publicly
Imagine if your comment is part of Exhibit A in a lawsuit.
The only solution is reputation and selling to the public domain, instead of to individuals:
if people like your stuff, you'll have a reputation because of what you made in the past, then you can offer to release your next project to the public domain if some crowdfunding goal is met.
That is possible, crowdfund the money up front based on reputation or the buzz surrounding the idea. The more popular something is, however, the more likely it will become a target for copycats.
Part of the issue is that people can feed the idea, descriptions, and pictures into the AI. Thus create knockoffs, for their crowdfund or as the basis for their similar software.
If the original person ever actually releases software, they can buy a copy and feed to the AI, to then beef up the features in the previously created similar software. The difference between the original and copycats can be few to just about none.
Unless the original creator is willing to fight it out in court, there is little they can do about the situation. Updates made in the original, can be "transferred" to the copycats. AI makes the speed and quality orders of magnitude higher.
11 replies →
[dead]
bro, music people are buying switches - like layer 2 switches - for better audio quality.
you're confusing musicians with "audiophiles"
1 reply →
I reverse engineered almost all electronics I own. Does it have USB that does more than just charging? Connect it to a computer and let AI play with it. Unless it's heavily secured like a phone that's pretty much all you need to do. Making some old remote work with various devices? Simple. Dumping the entire state of Rodecaster and controlling it in any you want with software, or maybe a remote? Why not. Old printer no longer works with MacOS 27? Ask for new drivers and now it does.
The printer 'debugging' was one of the funniest and most WTF situations I've been in lately. I used Claude for the drivers and was essentially used by it as a meat sock to diagnose what's happening. Was the text on each line progressively less visible, ie did grayscale work? How about quality between page 1 and 2, the first one should be lower DPI. Ok now unload the paper so I can see the error and add some handling for it. Good, now load paper again we'll check the duplex.
If you are reasonably familiar with computers, it really is as simple as pointing a strong model at a device and burning some tokens. Feels like a fever dream, especially since I had very little idea about anything that has to do with hardware.
I've had some luck with this too. Every device you buy wants you install an app on your phone. Not if I can help it.
Wish I could release the apps I've "made", but worry about DMCA
Just release it under a pseudonym. The worst they will do is force it off GitHub! Don't redistribute the firmware files if you're really concerned. I am also sort of struggling with this idea so I get where you're coming from.
1 reply →
Release the transcripts from the prompting sessions you had and I think most people familiar enough with LLMs will be able to replicate your results.
> Every device you buy wants you install an app on your phone. Not if I can help it.
That sounds interesting. What's the usual approach, install the app in some emulator or something, and ask your agent to reverse engineer it? Or is the setup for the agent to work simpler than that?
1 reply →
Use pseudonym and when you get DMCA request, you take it down...
1 reply →
Yes be able to give new life and maintain compatibility with old hardware and/or unsupported OSes is one of the recent positive aspects of agents with frontier models!
Also managed to bring back compatibility old printer with Linux and even unsupported one working only over bluetooth!
Before this era, you could imagine how it could work but would have rarely taken the time to do this grunt work. Now you ask, wait for a few minutes, do so meat proxy integration testing, iterate a few times and here you go.
Brings some hope for sustainable computing!
"Why is the computer playing weird noises"
"Claude is developing and testing a music app."
"Oh."
I call this wetware mcp
I like "meat proxy".
Someone please do "smart" TVs. You have the chance to remove ads and botnets ("residential proxies") from millions of devices.
They’re really locked down now because of people removing their spyware. Encrypted hardware, signed software.
If someone can do it I’d appreciate it, but it won’t be easy. Their whole business is spying on you.
At this point replacing the board with an open source brain might be the way to go with tvs.
LGs are fairly good: https://tv.slada.sk/guides/rooting-guide
Others like Samsung are unfortunately way worse, hard to secure.
I’m doing headphones … the cheapish Chinese white box ones….
I was hoping someone would do color printers inkjet and laser.
In a legal fight of printers VS AI behemoths, my money is on the ruthless printer mafia.
It's time to hack into my solar inverter...
1 reply →
You can do this with a DNS gateway in your home running on something like a Raspberry Pi. Check out AdGuard
How do you do this with XFinity? They no longer allow you set your own DNS servers "for better security".
2 replies →
Super easy: don't give them a network and use a dedicated STB that's kept patched instead. Ta-done.
I do that, but it would be nice to have a single device/remote and faster UI.
I had an obscure Alcatel modem/router laying around with undocumented hardware, where even the mainboard's CPU/SoC serial etc didn't return any results from any search engines.
Soldered UART pins on it, plugged my USB adapter into my computer, then asked an agent to reverse engineer the firmware blob. Took DeepSeek v4.1 flash around an hour to get a full OpenWRT build-and-flash pipeline up and running, using an isolated podman build container and everything.
The outdated OEM Kernel made it easy to identify the SoC hardware. drivers and proprietary Wi-Fi and Bluetooth driver mods (not really legal btw, because they "conveniently forgot" to publish GPL'd source code). Driver mods were successfully reversed through analyzing the .so and .ko files with frida in another podman container.
Overall took me less than half a day to do all this, and now I have OpenWRT running on that device, compiled from source with the upstream modern kernel.
To me, observing all that, and how quickly it found encryption keys, signing mechanisms, encodings, binary formats, instruction sets, disassembling it etc by just looking at the hexdumps ... this would have taken me weeks if not months.
And now comes the kicker, all that cost me 0.86$
AI and reverse engineering is like tap water now. There's no reason to not consider using it, because it's so accessible. There's just absolutely no point in proprietary hardware and software anymore.
My current project after this: I've soldered the UART pins to a proprietary Xiaomi smartphone I had laying around, and I'm currently letting it reverse engineer the baseband firmware. Let's see where this ends up ...
Man, that way I'd love to repurpose my Tokio Techbook (ARM wm8650, armv7?) with PostMarketOS, but there's no easy way to flash it...
What if someone made an AI that reversed engineered hardware, then looked up if any patents were infringed upon, then emailed the owners of said patents?
That would be very shitty.
Why would someone do that? To frustrate the patent system, or AI.
Just something that popped in my mind.
Yeah, that's definitely something no one should ever do. Really bad.
AI is incredible at making things viable (time-wise) that weren't before.
As an example, to show off my LLM-reverse-engineered-hardware project: a user-space driver and software for an old FireWire to USB box, the manufacturer drivers for which were last updated in 2006 and don't really work anymore on modern OSes (and never worked on Mac). Firewire these days in general is also incredibly buggy (needing legacy drivers for PCIe cards, software that wasn't updated since 2006, etc).
With a modern app, even something written in a few days, is already so much more pleasant to use and less buggy, than _all_ the old options that people were using before.
The hardware is quite unique because it's the only widely sold device(-family) that had a DV (FireWire/1394) connector for connecting mid-2000s camcorders, allowing you to transfer video via USB on computers that didn't (don't) have a FireWire port. And internally it works by packing the digital DV video stream into USB, without converting it, so you get the raw, full-quality video data as it was on the tape, the same you'd get it with a "real" firewire setup.
I guess the downside is that if people find out that this old, unique hardware is useful now, it will become expensive and hard to find.
It's here in case someone ever finds it useful: https://github.com/JonasCz/MarvinCapture
As an aside: I tried using claude to write GTK4 applications in december 2025/january 2026 and it was awful at it, barely even helpful. Then in September it's writing great gtk4 apps with barely any prompting.
The capability ceiling of models in general has risen massively in not even one year. Back in 2025, I also found them to generally be a net-negative expense of time and effort. I wouldn't universally make the same claim today.
I have KEF LSX II LT speakers on my desk. They sound wonderful, but they have this annoying issue in which waking them from standby plays REALLY LOUD music for a second or two before settling on the correct volume. It's jarring, and it's a widespread issue.
In a few hours yesterday, I built a macOS menu bar app [0] that ramps up the volume when the USB output is triggered. This is not reverse engineering but an effective workaround.
I am tempted to try to reverse engineer the speakers and see if I could fix them myself. But 1) I have a feeling they have security features enabled and 2) I would rather not brick this rather expensive pair of speakers.
[0] https://github.com/yeutterg/bookshelf-bar
[dead]
A few weeks ago, I had Claude develop a CUPS driver running over a Bluetooth connection for the mini photo printer Canon Zoemini 2: works great on Linux (NixOS), even though Canon only bothered to only support smartphones, never desktops!
Soon: "Hi Claude, can you translate iOS so it runs in a sandbox on Linux?"
Or: "Can you turn this tablet I got from AliExpress into an iPad?"
It's going to be interesting to watch the big companies struggle with this.
https://x.com/aehyok/status/2110580211553378377
Apple will block App Store access for this on day 1, claiming security, privacy or sth. Without App Store, and no way to side load, iOS is meaningless
So, in theory, I could just reverse-engineer the old Wacom tablet I have with no driver support for the M-series processor and build me a driver so I can continue using it? (there is a driver but it seems it will stop working with the next OS update).
Oh man, I did fall into that rabbit hole. I took my old mp3 player Onn-x5 and just finished a custom firmware for it. Explore and reverse engineer it just from connecting it to my computer.
I work in the courtrooms sometimes for some lawsuits and we use the ATEM Mini Pro to switch between ipads and pcs for both defense and plaintiffs sides.
Normally, when I'm running tech, the switcher is right next to me, easy peasy.
But recently I've been in cases where I have to sit far away due to the court layouts.
They can be controlled over network, but our setup requires that the devices have no internet connection, or rather, adding an internet connection to the system is at best impractical. However, there is wireless networking involved for some of the apps.
I realized that I could connect my phone to the wireless networking, plus in the Atem Mini Pro to that same network over ethernet, and control the Atem remotely.
I checked Blackmagic's website, and even though they offer an SDK and pretty decent software for controlling the devices, there are no apps to control them.
Talked to chatgpt and 20 minutes later on their $20/m plan I had an app that can find the device on the network, connect to it, switch between the inputs, turn on and off the various audio functions, and fade to black/unfade all from my android phone.
I still had to download android studio and build the app but it was not difficult at all. Extremely niche use case, very specific solution.
Instead of targeting extremely ancient hardware that almost no-one uses, what if you got Claude to reverse engineer useful closed source hardware and software?
Both Apple and Nvidia are the most hostile and have the most locked-down heavy hardware and software and now Claude can reverse engineer and build a driver to get Nvidia GPUs working on Intel Macs [0] and it can unlock the ability to pair an Apple watch with Android phones. [1]
Now it makes even more sense to target reverse engineering CUDA, Nvidia firmware blobs and Apple software to finally make them run better on Linux without waiting for those vendors to fix their bugs or deliberately slowing their own hardware down.
No more excuses.
[0] https://github.com/nullmoth/nvidia-macos-driver
[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/apple-watch-companion-pair-...
Not that simple but yes, even as a decades long "macOSX" fan I would love to see the Mac finally unshackled. Maybe Apple hardware could become a bit more like the Apple II era again after all? Asahi up to latest hardware generation; fully reverse engineered drivers down to the Metal... it would be a dream.
All of those things already got reversed in the past. You just haven't heard of them because they don't really matter without you know, the support, software updates, the ecosystem and so on. What use do you have from one specific version of nvcc or the fw for one specific version of a watch? Your work will be obsolete with the next watch, that's why people haven't bothered so far.
Of course if it's cheaper, someone might, but the real barrier is really the whole first-party support, it's not the technical stuff.
Because with enough time "the market" reverse engineers everything that has mainstream adoption, but only you are going to reverse engineer something that only you care about
I've already done this (more or less). Rolled a fully custom from scratch written stack. I've gotten Darwin to work as a standalone kernel with a GNU-like interface on top. Planning on porting the full MacOS environment when I find the time.
> Instead of targeting extremely ancient hardware that almost no-one uses
The author was targeting hardware that they owned. One of the big themes of FOSS is scratching one's own itch.
Because, frankly, older hardware is just much simpler and also has much more widely available information about it. It’s just easier. Not that you can’t try, but it’s going to be harder.
Except the ones that were brought up the last time you posted this not even a week ago?
> only to discover that in the time between me giving up and then trying again someone had committed code to SANE to support the scanner already…..it happens sometimes.
One of the best things you can do in these situations is to actually audit the code that was contributed against the code you have. If you have more than was contributed, you could potentially still make a contribution of what's missing, against the structure of the existing contribution.
Not sure why they vibed a negative-conversion tool when NegPy already exists, with a reverse-engineered OpticFilm 8200i already...
TFA addresses that:
> I decided to buy a negative photo scanner and found that the Plustek 8200i was supported under Linux so I bought that. Only to discover that the chipset in the scanner had changed to one that wasn’t supported under Linux anymore
because now they don't need to respect the LICENSE...
The author has been a free software author, contributor and active community member to many projects including GNOME, Freedesktop, GStreamer/Pipewire, and (if I recall correctly) LibreOffice for decades.
kids these days have no respect...
NegPy is mostly vibe-coded, too.
Software is in the same boat. Licenses and obfuscation never really protected anything - it was just too much work/effort to copy. Now it's one prompt..
Maybe someday someone will use this to make infotainment in cars like Polestar and Lucid actually stable and usable?
I'm sure they're also using AI to build those infotainment systems these days, so I don't think the stability / usability somehow magically comes from the use of AI.
Probably it does come from the manufacturer not caring and just releasing the bare minimum, whereas hobby developers can, and want to, spend more time on getting things perfect.
[dead]
"No more secrets" - Sneakers
Currently i'm using Opus to decompile bin blob and write a complete Bluetooth controller firmware for a chinese MCU. They are really good at it.
I'm kind of afraid there will soon be guardrails that make LLMs refuse to do this kind of stuff. Or legislation that results in that.
Yeah I’m rushing to reverse engineer some of my favorite games now when I have tokens to burn. Document the addresses, functions, break the encryption, unpack all assets. There’s no way opus keeps this functionality for long. Then I can have a dumber model continue the work or a smarter model with guardrails reassemble the pre-extracted logic and assets.
Isn't Gnome really Anti-AI?
Forgive my ignorance, but isn't this what patents are for?
A patent on a widget does not prevent me from building that exact widget.
In fact, a good patent will tell me exactly how to make that widget.
All a patent does is prevent me from building and selling that widget without getting permission from the patent holder, and even then, the patent holder has to discover that I am selling their widgets and possibly sue me to stop me or extract their fair portion of the proceeds if I do not agree to a preliminary settlement.
I'm thinkin about using codex/astra to reverse engineer claud code.
How timely, I just now pointed Claude at my work laptops MIPI driver and told it to figure it out.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]