"reverse engineering" entries

Four short links: 31 December 2015

Four short links: 31 December 2015

Reverse Engineering Playground, Feeding Graph Databases, Lessig, and Fantasies of Immortality

  1. crackmes.de — practice playground for reverse engineering and breaking protections.
  2. Feeding Graph Databases — exploring using logging systems to feed graph databases.
  3. Lessig Interview (WSJ) — the slogan says regulation should be more technology neutral. I am not sure I ever heard a more idiotic statement in my life. There is no neutrality here, just different modes. … I don’t what think the law should say here is what services can do and not do, because the technology is so (fast-changing) the law could never catch up. But that what (we want) to avoid are certain kinds of business models, a prison of bits, where services leverage control over access to content and profit from that control over content.
  4. Bubble-Driven PseudoscienceIn terms of life extension, here are the real opportunities: closing the gap between black and white patients, lowering the infant mortality rate, and making sure the very poorest among us have access to adequate care. You can make sure that many people live longer, right now! But none of this is quite as sexy as living forever, even though it’s got a greater payoff for the nation as a whole. So instead of investing in these areas, you’ve got a bunch of old white men who are afraid to die trying to figure out cryonics.
Four short links: 25 August 2015

Four short links: 25 August 2015

Microservices Anti-Patterns, Reverse Engineering Course, Graph Language, and Automation Research

  1. Seven Microservices Anti-PatternsOne common mistake people made with SOA was misunderstanding how to achieve the reusability of services. Teams mostly focused on technical cohesion rather than functional regarding reusability. For example, several services functioned as a data access layer (ORM) to expose tables as services; they thought it would be highly reusable. This created an artificial physical layer managed by a horizontal team, which caused delivery dependency. Any service created should be highly autonomous – meaning independent of each other.
  2. CSCI 4974 / 6974 Hardware Reverse Engineering — RPI CS course in reverse engineering.
  3. The Gremlin Graph Traversal Language (Slideshare) — preso on a language for navigating graph data structures, which is part of the Apache TinkerPop (“Open Source Graph Computing”) suite.
  4. Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation (PDF) — paper about the history of technology and labour. The issue is not that middle-class workers are doomed by automation and technology, but instead that human capital investment must be at the heart of any long-term strategy for producing skills that are complemented by rather than substituted for by technological change. Found via Scott Santens’s comprehensive rebuttal.

Anti-circumvention rules limit reverse engineering

An overview of requested exceptions for the 2014-15 triennial review of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Editor’s note: this article originally published in the July issue of Communications of the ACM (CACM); it is cross-published here with permission.

Matthew_Walker_knot-slackComputer security researchers and hobbyists who want to tinker with the software in their cars are among those who will find out by the end of 2015 whether the U.S. Copyright Office has issued exemptions from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anti-circumvention rules. Exemptions would enable these actors to engage in reverse engineering that might bypass technical measures that protect access to copyrighted software or content. It is much to be hoped for that the Office will exempt all uses that pose no threat of copyright infringement, which is all that the anti-circumvention rules were supposed to be about. Unfortunately, the rules were drafted very broadly. Hence, the need to seek exemptions.

This column, written in March and originally published in the July edition of Communications of the ACM, explores examples of DMCA exemption requests submitted for consideration. Read more…