Free?

[Daniel Gibson]

Am 28.10.2011 05:18, schrieb Chante:
> Daniel Gibson wrote:
>> Am 26.10.2011 23:38, schrieb Steven Schveighoffer:
>>>
>>> But it's much harder to reverse engineer how someone built a machine
>>> than it is to reverse engineer how software is built.
>>
>
> Note that reverse-engineering is like copying someone else's homework. It
> doesn't build any engineering capability. It actually hinders such from
> occurring.
>
>> Really?
>> I guess it depends on the machine but I imagine it isn't so hard to
>> dismantle a machine to find out how it works? (But I have no
>> experience with that,  it's just a guess)
>> Reverse Engineering software can be pretty hard if the author made it
>> deliberately hard, like Skype.
>>
>
> Interesting. How did Skype's engineer make it hard to reverse-engineer?
> Have a link?
>
>

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~salman/skype/ here are some links.
For example "Silver Neede in the Skype" seems to have some information, 
I didn't look at the other stuff.

One way to make reverse engineering harder is trying to detect debuggers 
(by measuring time and stuff takes longer if a debugger is involved etc) 
and then cease working.

Interestingly Skype for Linux didn't work on my sisters notebook 
(crashed shortly after starting), but when started in gdb (gnu debugger) 
it works fine.. dunno if this is related to anti-reverse 
engineering/debugging stuff not working properly, but I can imagine that 
all this voodoo breaks under certain circumstances.

Cheers,
- Daniel