3 ms·

Why obfuscate, when you can just follow modern trends and use webpack (or similar) which gives you completely unreadable shit.

• foobiekr 4y ago
  end of the day once you can apply a tool like ghidra to a given program, understanding what it is doing is straightforward unless they went to extremely great lengths beyond simple obfuscation reversing is one of the few classic skills from the home computing era that is alive and well in 2022. it's kind of nice.
• sphynxie 4y ago
  I certainly agree with your tone/sympathize with your frustration but I will say that on several occasions I have followed the webpack breadcrumbs to figure out what the hell is going on with a vendor's misbehaving script, knowing it's going to be faster than going through support. Some of these methods would make that much harder.
• cabirum 4y ago
  "Modern"? Webpack/code bundlers is quite an ancient tech by now. Regard it as an intermediate representation (IR) of your code, a stage between your readable source code and browser bytecode/jit. The "shit" is still readable since webpack also generates source maps.
  • kitten_mittens_ 4y ago
    Do you mean ancient like something has replaced it? Or old enough to be in widespread use?
• moritzwarhier 4y ago
  That's because Webpack includes a minifier (Terser) by default when running in production mode (I think since version 5, which went a lot in the direction of convention-over-configuration). It is easy to disable if you want to. Terser transforms non-global identifiers lexically and does some simple substitutions. Normally you want to bundle modules with their dependencies anyway, maybe transpile code... Then why not minify? Et voila, some completely unreadable shit.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jollybean 4y ago
  Oh I love this. Take it one step further: hire sufficiently terrible spaghetti coders that nobody, not you or even they know what the code does, and any hacker trying to make sense of it will feel ill.
  • pjbeam 4y ago
    I'm imagining some state or APT engineers who, having reversed the mess, are then having very fraught discussions about what it could mean and getting the boss to bring in a specialist to figure out what they're missing.
    • jollybean 4y ago
      So this is closer to reality than we might want to admit. I once had a terrible business idea that we laughed at internally and mentioned it to someone in the industry, who then promptly 'ripped it off'. Our 'secret' was not a great new product, it was actually a ridiculous concept.
  • jknutson 4y ago
    If I don’t know what I am doing, surely my enemy cannot know what I am doing either…