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"In parallel, the user had joined our public Discord server and engaged in conversations on how to violate the product’s terms of service, such as reverse engin

by vore 4y ago

"In parallel, the user had joined our public Discord server and engaged in conversations on how to violate the product’s terms of service, such as reverse engineering, which led to a ban by our volunteer community moderators. This was completely unrelated to the source code request, which no one, especially not our Discord moderation team, was aware of at the time. This is a particularly funny reason from Voice.ai, since by linking against LGPL libraries, Ronsor was absolutely permitted to reverse engineer the binary under the terms of the LGPL: You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications, [...] I hope the rightsholders sue them for this scummy behavior.

hinkley 4y ago
If I thought someone had stolen my code, I'd want to reverse engineer to be sure as well. "He was trying to haxxors us" might be part of the story arc but they seem to be claiming it's the beginning instead of the middle.
klabb3 4y ago
Also in the PR statement: > "We hope that this will ultimately strengthen our relationship with the open source community, and are thankful to our Discord members for their support." Yeah, ok. It’s amazing how tone deaf companies can be when it comes to the hacking community. You want a healthy relationship with the “open source world” or not? Because banning people without stating the reason will not do you any favors. Especially so when the supposed crime is disassembly. How about explaining what all that obfuscated data collection is used for instead of chasing down curious hackers? > Ronsor's post also questions the app's heavy use of obfuscation and the data it collects, which consists of: motherboard and CPU info; audio interfaces; OS version; enabled network interfaces, IP address, and MAC address; computer hostname; and Voice.ai install path
realusername 4y ago
Is there any way to prevent reverse engineering with TOS in the US? That's impossible in France, probably the same in the rest of the EU
- galleywest200 4y ago
  Reverse Engineering is allowed as far as I understand. This is why Nintendo cannot take down the Dolphin Emulator. As well your TOS only applies to those who agree. If someone pirates your software, or gets a free copy from "someone", to reverse it then you are SOL.
tzs 4y ago
Note that it says you cannot restrict reverse engineering for debugging modifications to the LGPL code. I'd expect all you'd need to reverse engineer from the proprietary code to support that is how it expects to call the LGPL code. E.g., things like how it is passing arguments, how it finds the library entry points, and things like that. From what you've quoted it sounds like one could craft a reverse engineering ban that only covers parts of the combined work that have nothing to do with modifying the LGPL code and have that be compatible with LGPL.

by vore 4y ago

hinkley 4y ago

If I thought someone had stolen my code, I'd want to reverse engineer to be sure as well. "He was trying to haxxors us" might be part of the story arc but they seem to be claiming it's the beginning instead of the middle.

klabb3 4y ago

Also in the PR statement: > "We hope that this will ultimately strengthen our relationship with the open source community, and are thankful to our Discord members for their support." Yeah, ok. It’s amazing how tone deaf companies can be when it comes to the hacking community. You want a healthy relationship with the “open source world” or not? Because banning people without stating the reason will not do you any favors. Especially so when the supposed crime is disassembly. How about explaining what all that obfuscated data collection is used for instead of chasing down curious hackers? > Ronsor's post also questions the app's heavy use of obfuscation and the data it collects, which consists of: motherboard and CPU info; audio interfaces; OS version; enabled network interfaces, IP address, and MAC address; computer hostname; and Voice.ai install path

realusername 4y ago

Is there any way to prevent reverse engineering with TOS in the US? That's impossible in France, probably the same in the rest of the EU

galleywest200 4y ago
Reverse Engineering is allowed as far as I understand. This is why Nintendo cannot take down the Dolphin Emulator. As well your TOS only applies to those who agree. If someone pirates your software, or gets a free copy from "someone", to reverse it then you are SOL.

tzs 4y ago

Note that it says you cannot restrict reverse engineering for debugging modifications to the LGPL code. I'd expect all you'd need to reverse engineer from the proprietary code to support that is how it expects to call the LGPL code. E.g., things like how it is passing arguments, how it finds the library entry points, and things like that. From what you've quoted it sounds like one could craft a reverse engineering ban that only covers parts of the combined work that have nothing to do with modifying the LGPL code and have that be compatible with LGPL.