4 ms·

Is the long-term goal going after SmartAssembly's market?

by johns 17y ago

daeken 17y ago
Redgate (owner of SmartAssembly) and Remotesoft in general. Yes. Their tools don't work worth a damn and they sell way, way too many licenses. I'd love to take a large chunk out of their market.
- johns 17y ago
  In fairness to Redgate, their tools have always worked for me. SmartAssembly worked pretty well when I used it too. They're just ridiculously expensive. So I would love to see some good competition for them.
  - daeken 17y ago
    They 'work', but they don't protect your code in any way. Beyond removing names from your code, they really don't do anything useful. It really seems to me like the people working on these obfuscators have never looked at unmanaged code obfuscators used in the wild -- with the amount of data available with .NET assemblies, you can do a whole, whole lot.
  - ComputerGuru 17y ago
    He's going to be charging 500USD per user per year. {sa} charges 500USD per user.
    - daeken 17y ago
      My price is certainly high, but if there's one thing I've learned in business it's that it's much easier to lower your price than to raise it.
      - nkohari 17y ago
        That's true, but at a $500 price point, you're also reducing your market substantially due to price elasticity. Be sure to lower the price quickly if you feel like you're not getting traction.
      - maxklein 17y ago
        If there is one thing I've learned is that people hate subscriptions.
- ComputerGuru 17y ago
  Sorry, but bashing your competition doesn't make you look "cool." I reviewed {smartassembly} back in 2007 (http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/smartassembly/ http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/smartassembly/) and till now it remains hands-down the best obfuscation and post-release-processing tool for .NET applications. For larger projects the obfuscation can break the product. It's tedious work, but you can manually exclude functions from the obfuscation procedure until you can find out where things went wrong.
  - daeken 17y ago
    I'm not terribly concerned about looking "cool", I'm simply stating what everyone who's reverse-engineered such obfuscated assemblies knows. These tools simply don't protect your code at all. I think it's a travesty that these tools sell as well as they do while doing nothing to hinder reverse-engineering. Edit: For the record, I performed quite a bit of reverse-engineering on Magic: The Gathering Online, which uses SmartAssembly for obfuscation. Despite it being heavily obfuscated, an hour with Mono.Cecil got me a clean binary with placeholder names. That is simply unacceptable.
    - viggity 17y ago
      I understand spending time on deobsfucation. But what about assembly encryption ala http://www.eziriz.com/intellilock.htm http://www.eziriz.com/intellilock.htm

Is the long-term goal going after SmartAssembly's market?

by johns 17y ago

Is the long-term goal going after SmartAssembly's market?

Redgate (owner of SmartAssembly) and Remotesoft in general. Yes. Their tools don't work worth a damn and they sell way, way too many licenses. I'd love to take a large chunk out of their market.

johns 17y ago
In fairness to Redgate, their tools have always worked for me. SmartAssembly worked pretty well when I used it too. They're just ridiculously expensive. So I would love to see some good competition for them.
- daeken 17y ago
  They 'work', but they don't protect your code in any way. Beyond removing names from your code, they really don't do anything useful. It really seems to me like the people working on these obfuscators have never looked at unmanaged code obfuscators used in the wild -- with the amount of data available with .NET assemblies, you can do a whole, whole lot.
- ComputerGuru 17y ago
  He's going to be charging 500USD per user per year. {sa} charges 500USD per user.
  - daeken 17y ago
    My price is certainly high, but if there's one thing I've learned in business it's that it's much easier to lower your price than to raise it.
    - nkohari 17y ago
      That's true, but at a $500 price point, you're also reducing your market substantially due to price elasticity. Be sure to lower the price quickly if you feel like you're not getting traction.
    - maxklein 17y ago
      If there is one thing I've learned is that people hate subscriptions.
ComputerGuru 17y ago
Sorry, but bashing your competition doesn't make you look "cool." I reviewed {smartassembly} back in 2007 (http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/smartassembly/ http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/smartassembly/) and till now it remains hands-down the best obfuscation and post-release-processing tool for .NET applications. For larger projects the obfuscation can break the product. It's tedious work, but you can manually exclude functions from the obfuscation procedure until you can find out where things went wrong.
- daeken 17y ago
  I'm not terribly concerned about looking "cool", I'm simply stating what everyone who's reverse-engineered such obfuscated assemblies knows. These tools simply don't protect your code at all. I think it's a travesty that these tools sell as well as they do while doing nothing to hinder reverse-engineering. Edit: For the record, I performed quite a bit of reverse-engineering on Magic: The Gathering Online, which uses SmartAssembly for obfuscation. Despite it being heavily obfuscated, an hour with Mono.Cecil got me a clean binary with placeholder names. That is simply unacceptable.
  - viggity 17y ago
    I understand spending time on deobsfucation. But what about assembly encryption ala http://www.eziriz.com/intellilock.htm http://www.eziriz.com/intellilock.htm