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When I was in high school I was hired by a company to fix a problem in code for which they only had the EXE, not even object files! Since I had a lot of experi
by phaedrus 18y ago
When I was in high school I was hired by a company to fix a problem in code for which they only had the EXE, not even object files! Since I had a lot of experience hex editing computer games, I was actually able to fire up a debugger and go down into the machine code and patch it. There are hackers who can work with machine code - but it sounds like if this company got into the mess their in in the first place (by letting go the engineers who knew the codebase), they're unlikely to attract the kind of talent that can patch a program with nothing but the binaries and a debugger.
- baha_man 18y agoI take your point (that it's possible to patch binaries) but I'm still very sceptical about the problems of this unnamed photo-sharing site. Seems a bit suspicious that the author knows about it but nobody here can guess who it is. I've just re-read the original article and had to laugh at this: '...a good source code control system would have avoided this problem... If only they had thought to buy one.' Saving the source code to a floppy disk or printing it out and putting it in a safe place would have avoided this problem, not to mention using CVS, Subversion, or one of the other free version control systems.