3 ms·

I know a linker developer, I'm going to send this to him :) Not sure about heresy according to computer science. Sure, it's not intended, but it's a very cleve

I know a linker developer, I'm going to send this to him :) Not sure about heresy according to computer science. Sure, it's not intended, but it's a very clever thing to be able to do.

boricj 2y ago
Delinking by itself isn't a heresy (no more than disassembly or decompilation), but what I do with it definitively is. Ripping out MIPS code from a PlayStation video game and shoving it into a Linux program, dismembering a x86 Linux program and turning it into a native Windows program... It's when you get creative and throw ABIs out the window in order to create some cursed chimeras that this really becomes heresy.
- nrr 2y ago
  One person's heresy is another person's sickos.png. This sounds exactly like my favorite sort of object code vivisection.
liamYC 2y ago
Technology like this will create huge selection pressures against desktop apps if it becomes easy for people to reverse engineer, remove payment mechanisms, and then freely distribute. Wouldn’t you think?
- pmontra 2y ago
  Freely redistribute, I don't know. If a program can extract code from another one, a program can detect that code. It looks similar to virus signatures. A company with some IP would run the detector on the software of competitors.
- boricj 2y ago
  Delinking isn't a miracle technology in that regard, you still need to put in the work to reverse-engineer the artifact. It does allow a couple of nifty tricks, like pervasive binary patching (if the program is chunked into relocatable object files, then you're no longer constrained by the original program memory layout when patching/replacing stuff). It's also useful for decompilation projects, where you can reimplement a program one piece at a time until you no longer have binary pieces left and still create a fully working program at each step (you don't even need perfectly matching decompilation since the linker will mend stuff back together anyway).
- fragmede 2y ago
  The tools and know-how to remove payment mechanisms from binaries have existed basically as long as binaries themselves have.

I know a linker developer, I'm going to send this to him :) Not sure about heresy according to computer science. Sure, it's not intended, but it's a very clever thing to be able to do.

boricj 2y ago

Delinking by itself isn't a heresy (no more than disassembly or decompilation), but what I do with it definitively is. Ripping out MIPS code from a PlayStation video game and shoving it into a Linux program, dismembering a x86 Linux program and turning it into a native Windows program... It's when you get creative and throw ABIs out the window in order to create some cursed chimeras that this really becomes heresy.

nrr 2y ago
One person's heresy is another person's sickos.png. This sounds exactly like my favorite sort of object code vivisection.

liamYC 2y ago

Technology like this will create huge selection pressures against desktop apps if it becomes easy for people to reverse engineer, remove payment mechanisms, and then freely distribute. Wouldn’t you think?

pmontra 2y ago
Freely redistribute, I don't know. If a program can extract code from another one, a program can detect that code. It looks similar to virus signatures. A company with some IP would run the detector on the software of competitors.
boricj 2y ago
Delinking isn't a miracle technology in that regard, you still need to put in the work to reverse-engineer the artifact. It does allow a couple of nifty tricks, like pervasive binary patching (if the program is chunked into relocatable object files, then you're no longer constrained by the original program memory layout when patching/replacing stuff). It's also useful for decompilation projects, where you can reimplement a program one piece at a time until you no longer have binary pieces left and still create a fully working program at each step (you don't even need perfectly matching decompilation since the linker will mend stuff back together anyway).
fragmede 2y ago
The tools and know-how to remove payment mechanisms from binaries have existed basically as long as binaries themselves have.