Saturday, February 05, 2005
Remeberances of a Reverse Engineer!
Going through a post on Cryptography on one of the ace management forums of our times,I remembered how I took up a pretty serious liking for Reverse Engineering (cracking if you please) sharable softwares in my college days...that was eons ago ...the way software guys have commercialised knowledge,which added to the ensuing pressures of profit based on volume/sales/deadlines etc, I can bet current softwares have gone more commercial and come up with even more loopholes for the smart ppl like us...!Tried my hand even on some phreaking , u know the various color boxes(basically electronic circuits names like red box,blue box etc...all available on phreaking sites nowdays),but mostly these were suitable for US/UK use on Ma Bell circuits et al!Not much successes there!
I got initiated by "Zen and the art of cracking" by +ORC and later the matter on Fravia's site. This +ORC chap was a Russian and this was his ICQ handel.Pretty wonderful stuff he'd written there to get you started on the path! My tributes to him and someone called Icedeath(if i remember corrctly) .Both Gurus of the game!+ORC was so much ahead of the ppl in that time he even used to engineer those OMR holograms on products ,swap his home-made lables with genuine ones and walk away from the stores,with baggage full of free stuff!
The process of cracking the date/max no of uses/etc limits for a particular software was painfully undertaken in our times with some common debugging tools like Softice(debugger),wasm(windows assembler) etc.The bloatware is usually reverse engineered through softice to assembly code,and then scanned nd analysed.It's more a work of art to get to the "Bingo Point" in the software , where the offensive comparisions are made (for example)of today's counters with a prefixed value ...and nullify the capitalists motive !
Sometimes it takes days(mostly nights ) on end to get to the ,for want of a better word,may we call it- The Bingo point ( My first reverse engineering lasted half a month...I was put up on the "Hall of Shame" in a reverse Engineering forum website after I triumphantly published my efforts :mad: )! But then once you get used to it,it becomes something of an addiction....To reverse engineer every new beta version or shareware that the luzers present to you on those dirt cheap ,year-old ,second-hand CHIP CDs( It's now Digit ,is it?) is a step towards the free access of knowledge to all...that's the ideological fig leaf...The real incentive is to get latest versions of all softwares for free in your machine,where you can leisurely pursue your hobby of software evaluation and maybe make a living out of it!
By the way.did you know that the max number of ppl arrested /apprehended for cracking and hacking crimes are usually luzers who utilize tolos made by someone else and posted on the net,and dont have an idea of what they are doing!These are the ppl who give a bad name to our true egalitarian enterprise ;-)
Paapi pet ke khaatir sab kuchch chhoot gaya...but take it from me :the thrill of uncoding a bloatware is next to no other adventure sports!
Enuf gyaan for now!
Catch ya.
View Comments : http://www.pagalguy.com/cat/showthread.php?t=6679
I got initiated by "Zen and the art of cracking" by +ORC and later the matter on Fravia's site. This +ORC chap was a Russian and this was his ICQ handel.Pretty wonderful stuff he'd written there to get you started on the path! My tributes to him and someone called Icedeath(if i remember corrctly) .Both Gurus of the game!+ORC was so much ahead of the ppl in that time he even used to engineer those OMR holograms on products ,swap his home-made lables with genuine ones and walk away from the stores,with baggage full of free stuff!
The process of cracking the date/max no of uses/etc limits for a particular software was painfully undertaken in our times with some common debugging tools like Softice(debugger),wasm(windows assembler) etc.The bloatware is usually reverse engineered through softice to assembly code,and then scanned nd analysed.It's more a work of art to get to the "Bingo Point" in the software , where the offensive comparisions are made (for example)of today's counters with a prefixed value ...and nullify the capitalists motive !
Sometimes it takes days(mostly nights ) on end to get to the ,for want of a better word,may we call it- The Bingo point ( My first reverse engineering lasted half a month...I was put up on the "Hall of Shame" in a reverse Engineering forum website after I triumphantly published my efforts :mad: )! But then once you get used to it,it becomes something of an addiction....To reverse engineer every new beta version or shareware that the luzers present to you on those dirt cheap ,year-old ,second-hand CHIP CDs( It's now Digit ,is it?) is a step towards the free access of knowledge to all...that's the ideological fig leaf...The real incentive is to get latest versions of all softwares for free in your machine,where you can leisurely pursue your hobby of software evaluation and maybe make a living out of it!
By the way.did you know that the max number of ppl arrested /apprehended for cracking and hacking crimes are usually luzers who utilize tolos made by someone else and posted on the net,and dont have an idea of what they are doing!These are the ppl who give a bad name to our true egalitarian enterprise ;-)
Paapi pet ke khaatir sab kuchch chhoot gaya...but take it from me :the thrill of uncoding a bloatware is next to no other adventure sports!
Enuf gyaan for now!
Catch ya.
View Comments : http://www.pagalguy.com/cat/showthread.php?t=6679
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