CTFE and DI: The Crossroads of D

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 03:50:42AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
[...]
> Actually, here's a great example of the evils of closed...well, the
> evils of closed *platforms* which IMNSHO are 100x worse than merely
> "closed source software":
> 
> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120326/08360818246/patents-threaten-to-silence-little-girl-literally.shtml

That wouldn't be the first time something like this happened. It happens
on a routine basis. Pharmaceutical companies do things like this all the
time. They will refuse to fund research, or actively seek to hamper
research (e.g. by holding patents they threaten to sue anyone with who
dares produce said cure), that may lead to a cure to some disease which
they currently sell treatments for, or they will outright refuse to
produce said cure when it's discovered -- because once there's a cure,
there's no more need of treatments, so they will lose money. So they'd
rather there will *never* be a cure so that people will continue buying
treatments.  Human life? What's that? Never heard of such a thing. More
money, more wealth, at the expense of our customers!


[...]
> But there are systems that are real PITA with encryption though: For
> example, the RockBox project never did (last I checked) manage to
> crack the Zune or the particular model of Toshiba Gigibeat the Zune
> was derived from (the "S" I think), and a big part of that was b/c of
> some nasty DRM/security measures that were built into the hardware
> itself, unlike a normal x86 for example. So you couldn't just do some
> simple man-in-the-middle like you described. Of course, game systems
> have hardware-level DRM/securtity too and they always get cracked, but
> they're much more popular than the Zune ever was (Which is a shame, I
> would have considered the original Zune 1 (not the shitty second one)
> to be the world's most perfect music player if it weren't for
> Apple-inspired truckload of DRM/lockout bullshit that was involved
> anytime you wanted it to communicate with a computer). Point being,
> consumer devices with hardware-level DRM/security fucking suck ;)

Yeah, wasn't TPM being touted as the silver bullet to viruses and
hacking and stuff, like, a decade ago? And nowadays they're nowhere near
as widespread as they were predicted to be? The fact is, hardware
encryption makes interoperability a big bear, and today's online world
is all about interoperability. It also makes things a royal pain to use,
should you ever want to upgrade your system and migrate your data.

The only thing that can come close to being uncrackable is something
that's so hard to use that most people wouldn't bother with it. Which
gave me a funny thought: one way of writing code that nobody can steal
is to write it in MALBOLGE (http://www.lscheffer.com/malbolge.shtml).
Then you can freely distribute source code and everything -- nobody will
be able to understand how the damn thing works, and they won't be able
to modify the code without totally breaking it.

The only catch is, this "nobody" includes the programmer, because
MALBOLGE is practically impossible to write non-trivial programs in. For
example, here's the hello world program:

	http://www2.latech.edu/~acm/helloworld/malbolge.html

This is, to date, the most complex MALBOLGE program _ever_ written. Now,
say you wish the change the message from hello world to something else,
say goodbye code thieves. You basically have to re-architect the whole
thing from scratch. It's not a matter of changing a few characters here
and there; you have to literally start over from the drawing board. The
resulting program will look NOTHING like this one.

Now try writing cp in MALBOLGE. The day you can do that, is the day you
can retire, because it's so incredibly hard that you might as well be
solving the halting problem instead.


[...]
> Yea, the fact this shit is even *allowed* to exist in a
> *cough*"modern"*cough* society makes my blood boil. I know corporation
> are legal entities, but for sanity (let alone anything as luxurious as
> justice) to prevail, "corporate entities" must be deemed second-class
> citizens, at best. Meh, I usually try not to think about it just so I
> can actually get things done. And then I bitch about it at every
> opportunity ;)

Yeah I never understood the reasoning behind treating corporations as
legal entities on the same level as persons. That simply makes no sense
on so many levels it's not even funny. And it leads to stupidities like
"the corporation" doing things that no person with any shred of
conscience would be able to do and be able to live with themselves
afterwards. As though the corporation has a personality of its own apart
from the personalities of its constituents. Never made a shred of sense
to me.


T

-- 
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about
telescopes." -- E.W. Dijkstra