It's insane, right? Reverse engineering is so much fun, I find myself doing it on random apps so often now
reply0x Alpha is unlimited free tokens this weekend so I had it take apart the original 8088 PC Elite and reverse it back to original MASM assembler and come up with plausible names for all the functions and data structures and check that it compiles back to byte-perfect original.
replyWild!
it's especially fun when you do it yourself, I advise toying around with https://crackmes.one. with time and practice, everything becomes open-source because you can read assembly XD
replyNot legally, which is the issue. I can "open source" Windows 11 and rip out some of the shittiness, but Microsoft is gonna take issue. If it were MIT licensed that would be a different story, but there isn't enough money for lawyers in the world where it's not.
replyReverse engineering is legal in the US. You just can't disseminate the results if it runs afoul of copyright law or patents.
replywho said that you still technically cannot disseminate the results? bulletproof hosting and private communications still exist. if law is being used to harm the consumer, the consumer in question has full moral right to speak out against it, and taking ownership of your hardware (like OP tells they did) is one of the best ways
replyI know enough people for whom this risk is the entire appeal
replySo what? Just be mindful of what you post on the clearnet. What you're doing is like worrying about the illegality of making sparkler bombs in your backyard IMO.
replyWe're entering an age where doing binary modification on live binaries is not a huge deal. Everything is now open "source"?
replyWhat is it called when there's a process that's available to individuals but is long and onerous and cannot be shared among them? Saying the binaries are open source now means that the work of reverse engineering will be repeated exactly in proportion to the number of times it's modified. I would argue on a large scale this is still effectively closed source.
replyAs soon as you can share binary patches (highly illegal of course) we're off to the races.
replyBinary patches aren’t illegal right? How would they be?
replyI'm not a lawyer. But I think if your "binary patch" is a series of instructions to write specific code to specific locations in a binary file, and the patch itself doesn't include any of the code present in the original binary, making/distributing a binary patch can't possibly be copyright infringement.
replyIt's normal in the videogame ROM hacking community to distribute this kind of binary patches (known as IPS patches) so as to avoid legal trouble, since the binary patch is useless if the user doesn't have access to the original videogame ROM. Distributing the ROM or even its patched version would be illegal, but a patch of the kind I mentioned is fine.
CFAA and friends (in the US, at least) means that even things you might not otherwise expect are illegal get turned into super illegal.
replyBinary patches are probably fine to make, but to distribute them for other people's binaries is probably not.
More like mildly illegal. Seems on par with torrents to me.
replyI would move the quotes to "open" since the issue of licensing is still left. Although LLM providers have shown that they don't care about copyright so it should go both ways.
replyQuotes for all of it, it's a closed binary that is transparently user modifiable these days I guess, so "open" "source".
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