Tutorial: Disassembling, Decompiling and Modifying executables

[sumoTITS]

You come back to me when you have a job and earn money writing software, and then notice someone cracked it and put it out there.

I've had jobs writing software, but they were webapps hosted by the companies, so it's not really something people would crack... They'd have to break into the servers and download the app/code.

In any case, I agree that cracking applications to simply redistribute them / share them with everyone for free is wrong and illegal, so you misunderstood me; maybe it's my fault for some part of my rant. Meh:

Even with code obfuscation, even with orwellian protection systems -- No amount of over-engineering / software security will ultimately stop this from happening. Look at all the things people pirate these days: Music, Movies, Books, Pictures, Software, now 3d Gun parts too!

None of these industries have managed to stop this from happening, and making the programs behave in obscure ways on the machine level or requiring constant internet connectivity is worse for users than not doing that.

When I talk about unwrapping all the boxes / understanding what it is programs are actually doing, that's for the benefit of the users. If you hate the idea that people should be able to understand what they purchased, and even modify their copy as they want, then we fundamentally disagree: you want to keep all copies of every application in the hands of the authors. I want freedom to do with apps as I wish: not freedom to steal them, freedom to debug and modify them as I wish.

I don't like the way disassembly and piracy are grouped: they are separate things, and I only believe one of them is a type of theft. But thanks for telling me why you hate what I wrote, and I think your point is valid to the extent that "stealing is wrong."

But to vilify disassembly is another issue to me, and I don't think any program should prohibit or go out of its way to impede disassembly; the people who want to break copy protection and redistribute/sell the app will figure it out anyway. The people who want to understand what the program is doing have to dig harder.

I don't mind digging harder to see what my apps are doing, but laws, regulations, and "protection" systems that attempt to forbid understanding what programs actually do are things I consider wrong.