Tina Gasperson wrote:
>
> Yes, but don't you think it is odd that no one on the other side (our side)
> has made much of it either? If it was a big deal or potentially damaging to
> MS, Slashdot and Linuxtoday would be all over it - right?
It's probably about as "dangerous" as any of the Java decompilers that
were floating around for a while. At least in terms of being able to do
nasty evil things with the source code that's been "recovered."
It's kind of interesting to see java bytecodes re-translated back into
Java, but in the end, not entirely useful. (Unless stupid people do
stupid things like hardcode passwords into the code that gets sent out.
That's happened more than once, but finding things like that don't
always require source code. (Although often makes things pop up that
have been hiding for years, ref: the Interbase 'back door'.))
The bigger deal, as I see it, would be the potential loss of
"Proprietary Intellectual Property" coming from a C#/.Net/whatever the
name of the .Net bytecode stuff is called decompiler to companies that
have bought into the .Net hoopla. Companies will claim that a bytecode
decompiler is illegal as it violates their copyright, is theft of IP,
etc, etc.
Unfortunately, THAT is the bigger threat, and it's the threat to the
free/open software community that people should be paying attention to
It's why Microsoft has been a big supporter of thingslike UCITA and
DMCA. If decompilation/reverse-engineering is made illegal, punishable
by ridiculous fines and possibly jail sentences, it marks the end of
true cross-platform compatibility. Nobody would ever have figured out
how to talk to Microsoft's incompatible Kerberos "extensions", Samba
never would have been created, nobody would ever have hope of writing
Word or Excel document translators. Etc, ad infinitum.
Which is exactly where Microsoft wants things.
As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft might as well have written and
released that decompiler, merely so they can be assured that a lawsuit
involving someone "reverse engineering copyrighted intellectual
property" will come about so much sooner so that they can pour millions
and billions of dollars of marketing funds into to make sure that THEY
win and win the right to prevent people from "reverse engineering",
which of course would deny US the right to try to make software that
works with theirs and leaves them with an even bigger monopoly and us
with fewer resources to work around it.
Call me a cynic ("you're a cynic!") but there is very little I would put
past Microsoft when it comes to them maintaining a stranglehold on their
market. If it looks like there's the slight possibility that any sort
of information about a product could be flowing in a direction that
doesn't immediately seem to Microsoft's benefit, my bet is that they
have an ulterior motive and that information is actually heading towards
something even bigger for them.
> On Monday 09 April 2001 15:09, you wrote:
> > Tina Gasperson wrote:
> > > So, how common would be it be for someone to gain access to a network
> > > using .Net tools?
> > > -tina
> > >
> > > On Monday 09 April 2001 12:15, you wrote:
> > > > The language of ms's .NET, C#, evidently now has decompiler available:
> > > > http://thebusiness.vnunet.com/News/1120202
> > > > Malicious hackers will be able to wreak havoc with this tool.
> > > > And it couldn't happen to a bunch of nicer guys!
> > > > Smitty
> >
> > The PR mavens at m$ don't want this to spread around, so naturally they
> > are doing what is called in the PR trade, a anti-narrative.
--
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;$t=255;@t=map
{$_%16or$t^=$c^=($m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110;
$t^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)
[$_%8]}(16..271);if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h=5;$_=unxb24,join
"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$d=
unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3];$d=$d>>8^($f=$t&($d
>>12^$d>>4^$d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e>>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*
8^$q<<6))<<9,$_=$t[$_]^(($h>>=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}
print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval
usage: qrpff 153 2 8 105 225 < /mnt/dvd/VOB_FILENAME \
| extract_mpeg2 | mpeg2dec -
http://www.eff.org/ http://www.opendvd.org/
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/
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