[NateLawson]

I've spent a lot of time both reversing and creating these kinds of schemes. Anyone else here?

I gave a talk a few years back, comparing both retro and modern copy protection schemes. Also designed hardware for dumping floppies at the bitcell level (ZoomFloppy) and co-designed the Blu-ray content protection system.

http://www.slideshare.net/rootlabs/copy-protection-wars-anal...

Now my day job (SourceDNA) is building tools to reverse lots of code at scale. A never-ending stream of apps provides a ton of "wat?" moments as you never expect developers to make the choices they do.

[mwcampbell]

> Now my day job (SourceDNA) is building tools to reverse lots of code at scale. A never-ending stream of apps provides a ton of "wat?" moments as you never expect developers to make the choices they do.

Can you give an example?

[NateLawson]

Sure, how about linking against the platform OpenSSL implicitly by grabbing a lib.so from an actual Android phone, linking against it with the NDK, and hoping that the ABI will never change?

https://sourcedna.com/blog/20150806/predicting-app-crashes-o...

And all that only to get access to MD5 or AES...

[stcredzero]

I remember the "Nibbles Away" software on the Apple ][ and there was another one that worked at the bit level.

At one computer camp I was at, someone had hacked a bit copy program that managed to look like you were playing Pong in the foreground. (Otherwise the counselors would look over your shoulder and bust you.)