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.