The news feeds us Heartbleed, the academics advocate their "safe" languages, and the mindless masses rejoice in delight at the "security" of their new "user-friendly" locked-down consumption and surveillance devices.
Yet if it weren't for "unsafe" languages and exploits, jailbreaking, rooting, console homebrew, and other freedom-increasing activities would be essentially eliminated.
A world in which the security of systems is strongly proved is a dystopia of government and corporate control, one in which no one can ever have any freedom. An inescapable walled garden of mindless sheeple, kept consuming and happy in their ignorance.
Insecurity is freedom.
"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."
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Anonymous2015-01-28 7:26
>>16 It's sad isn't it. We have to resort to hacking to take ownership of our own computers.
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Anonymous2015-01-28 8:40
>>16 Or you could simply stop buying those machines that are inherently in jail and spend your time one machines that don't put users in jail.
>>18 "Or you could simply stop using any form of computer." Radical Stallmanism is not much better than that.
If only RMS was clever enough to realise that advancing decompiler technology would be able to "force open" the source of any program, against all legal restrictions, and pushed for development of RE with the FSF, maybe we'd be living in a much freer world now...
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Anonymous2015-01-28 14:33
Cudder is all talk and no action.
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Anonymous2015-01-28 15:07
>>24 Suppose you can disassemble The App. Its a 20MB binary. It produces >150MB of asm, which your advanced decompiler will transform into C code, giving about 10-20MB "source" filled with cryptic functions(which don't have to correspond to original in content: code is optimized/unrolled/etc by compiler into that) and zero comments.
>>26 Educate programmers to understand more than just the code they write. It's all about the skill. Decompilers can assign appropriate names to variables based on how they're used - even IDA can do some of this already.
>>28 +1, this is actually one of the few advantages of platforms like Java and .NET - decompilation is easy, even in the presence of obfuscation. It's also another advantage of external libraries, since everything at the border has nice names even if the stuff inside doesn't. As evidence of this, the Android ecosystem has lots of app-modders.
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Anonymous2015-01-28 23:31
>>18 Companies that sell locked down machines have artificially low prices, which they hope to make up for by locking you into a long term subscription service tied to the machine. By forcing the machine open, you can use the product without their paid service. So you get a cheap computer and you help bankrupt the evil company. It's a win win.
"If you outlaw freedom only outlaws will have freedom."
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Anonymous2015-01-30 18:40
>>30 Decompilation is not an advantage. It means programmers won't get paid anymore because it's cheaper to steal code from existing solutions than to pay programmers to reinvent the bicycle.
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Anonymous2015-01-30 19:29
>>43 sorry dog you can't get many jobs rewriting fibs all day anyway
the academics advocate their "safe" languages, and the mindless masses rejoice in delight at the "security" of their new "user-friendly" locked-down consumption and surveillance devices.
This troll makes it look like there's no difference between "verified to work correctly" security and "you can't do jack shit without paying $$ to Big Bro Corp." security.
>>24 The power to examine binaries is not enough. You can be sued out of existence if you use anything you have learned by doing so. Most software that interfaces with undocumented components is created through analysis of "black box" event traces.
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Anonymous2015-01-31 1:13
>>47 Do you want a cracker? So more water? Is there a breeze going through your cage? If only you could explain to me your condition instead of just repeating these phrases every time you wanted to tell me something. It would make being a bird owner to much easier.
>>45 You may not be a dog, but you sure are a bitch.
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Anonymous2015-01-31 23:00
If you use a so called safe language run in a VM, the Jews just pay the people who make the VM to insert a back door, and all of your programs are compromised!
>>46 This idiot thinks the former won't be used for the latter.
>>48 But proving that is the hard part when reverse-engineering becomes nearly trivial, and of course the point is to build upon and improve the existing software - not copy it directly.
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Anonymous2015-02-01 22:54
>>55 DRM and spyware are implemented in C just fine as it stands. Having good safety&correctness languages will help corporations only insofar as it will help all programmers: sure, their brand new BigBro spydata aggregator will be certified not to segfault and have no memory leaks, but it's not like segfaults and memory leaks were its biggest weaknesses anyway.
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RedCream2015-02-02 17:57
Look, why can we not discharge our loathing for each other and rally thus as gentlemen behind the cause originally identified, that being the disappearance of Tablecat's message bord? I am hurting here, in a terrible pain from the loss. Have I sought in vain for succor here?