Registered: Aug 2000
Location: 54.60°N 5.70°W
Posts: 1950

Reverse Engineering

Not a problem, but this is a technological institute, isn't it? I was reading slashdot earlier and came across this link. A rather passionate treatise on why the privacy legislation currently coming into force is wrong. Have a read at it for a while if the forum is slow, or something. Comments, opinions ... etc?

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There is no music any more.
Music was assassinated on the 8th December 1980

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Registered: Aug 2000
Location: the heart of an awl
Posts: 3691

A valid patent should protect a company from having a truly novel technology ripped off. If a company is too lazy to try to keep their trade secrets a secret, instead choosing to rely on an anti-reverse engineering law to protect their unpatented product, I think the secret probably belongs in the public domain.

CueCat has a fucked up business model. They give their product away for free. It gathers user information without clear consent, then CueCat sells this info to the corporate clients/partners. That's just plain theft. Then they have the gall to get upset when people use their hardware (which is not all that novel) for other purposes.

Lack of disclosure is so anti-consumer. Consumers ought to respond by only choosing products from businesses that are upfront about their products and services, using the only vote that really counts. But then, that requires some responsibility on the part of the consumer. I'm too cynical to believe that people are up to it.

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Registered: Sep 2000
Location: 51N3, 114W3
Posts: 1071

This reminds me of a couple of events in the past few years, the MS Office debacle notwithstanding.

A company by the name of Panic Software (ironic isn't it) produced an FTP client by the name of Transit. The first time you used it it sent out information it gather off you hard drive and sent to the company. It sent registration info only, supposedly, to avoid "piracy", along with user info. What user info, the company never specified. Panic also makes Audion, an MP3 player. One can only wonder what info was sent along with Audion's registration info.

Word files, at one point in time, would "accidently" gather information from your hard drive and shove it into .doc files. What purpose this could possibly serve is beyond me, but Microsoft was rather slow to respond (the info was only visible if you opened a Word document if a text editor like BBEdit and saw that, amongst other things, the formating information included interesting things like what files you've resently deleted off your hard drive).

Are companies hiding little snippets of code to steal information about users? Damn straight they are. You can't even get through MS Support without forking over your credit card number, even to report a bug. The number of times one must type in personal information just to get an application to install is getting ridiculous, not to mention the amout of rubbish you have to fill out to even look at some information these days on the net.

Reverse engineering products is an extreme step to take, but nonetheless may be warranted. At a time when information is precious, and costly, I figure if there's a buck to be made off my information, it better be me making it.

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In my ultra-pissed-off opinion, I think governments the world over have gone out of their plodding, pathetic, "what part of the civil SERVANT bit don't you understand" way to avoid protecting the rights of the individual in this regard. And if they won't do anything about it, that makes up to us.

[This message has been edited by scatmonkey (edited 10-11-2000).]

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Registered: Aug 2000
Location: the heart of an awl
Posts: 3691

quote:

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Originally posted by scatmonkey:
Reverse engineering products is an extreme step to take, but nonetheless may be warranted. At a time when information is precious, and costly, I figure if there's a buck to be made off my information, it better be me making it.

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