4 ms·
Actually, as I've said elsewhere, one easy way of protecting a protocol is to explicitly restrict the right to reverse engineer in in the Terms of Service of th
by michael_dorfman 15y ago
Actually, as I've said elsewhere, one easy way of protecting a protocol is to explicitly restrict the right to reverse engineer in in the Terms of Service of the client that implements the protocol. Without that client, there's nothing to reverse engineer.
- barrkel 15y agoI'm not sure that's necessarily enforceable everywhere; it can be interpreted as an illegal barrier to competition.
- michael_dorfman 15y agoThat might be true; but do you want to be responsible for hiring the team of lawyers to go head-to-head against Microsoft's lawyers on that point?
- lurker19 15y agoThanks for reminder to contribute to the EFF this year. We have strength in numbers.
- dmc 15y agoWhat about if a developer were to now download the source code available here? Could they, in theory, develop with it as they've never attempted to reverse engineer it themselves? By using ToS, you're limiting enforcement to the people who do the RE, rather than an implementation, surely?
- jcr 15y agoActually, no. If you look at those files, you're "tainted" and can't be the one who writes a new implementation. The correct way to do reverse engineering for compatibility is to have to completely separate teams. The first does the reverse engineering and writes the specification/documentation. The second completely separate teams takes the specs/docs and writes an entirely new implementation. This is the process used to achieve the "IBM PC Compatible" system you're probably using right now (including your Mac). Reading up on the development of the Compatibles is a good way to understand how to do reverse engineering correctly.
- lesterbuck 15y agoOf course that was not the way the "IBM PC Compatible" market arose. IBM published a rather complete set of documentation of the system, including all interface signals and the BIOS source code. I still have several of those documents on my shelf. It is completely different from the complete lack of Skype technical documents.
- jcr 15y agoIBM released documentation after the PC had been cloned through "clean room" reverse engineering. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible
- lesterbuck 15y agoThen the cloners moved at warp speed. According to Wikipedia, the PC AT shipped in 1984. For nostalgia, I kept my copy of IBM Personal Computer Hardware Reference Library Technical Reference, Pub #1502494. "This manual describes the various units of the IBM Personal Computer AT and how they interact. It also has information about the basic input/output system (BIOS) and about programming support. The information in this publication is for reference, and is intended for hardware and program designers, programmers, engineers, and anyone else who needs to understand the design and operation of the IBM Personal Computer AT." It includes the source listing of the PC AT BIOS, as well as complete interface pinouts, etc. The colophon for this manual reads First Edition (March 1984) So what is your time line for IBM only publishing this manual after the PC AT was cloned?
- praptak 15y agoThe extent to which ToS are enforcible has to be tested yet, especially wrt people who aren't even using the client. I mean hackers who just take advantage of the information released by someone who actually broke the ToS. How are they even bound by the ToS?
- viraptor 15y agoAny software available for free will end up on rapidshare-like page where you can get the binaries and analyse them without accepting ToS or even installing the software. ToS is pretty useless for protecting against RE, since you don't need to look at it.