[Annatar]

"That would have been impossible without detailed info about ext2/3/4 available."

Try telling that to IKARI+TALENT, Legend, Skid Row, PaRaDoX and all the other cracking groups from Commodore64, Amiga, ATARI ST, PlayStations, Nintendos, groups which competed on who is going to one-file a program or convert a secret disk coding format to a regular filesystem, with all the protections disabled and the programs bug and NTSC+PAL fixed while they were at it...

[pjc50]

"Easier". Yes, you could reverse engineer all that information yourself. It just takes ages.

[Annatar]

They competed on both quality and speed, as in who will be the first to 0-day the program which had to work 100%. Whoever got the 100% crack first won, anybody else's crack would get nuked. Them's the rules.

So, either we have gross incompetence across the entire information technology industry in general if it's impossible or slow, or the people disassembling custom filesystems and protections, bug fixing binaries and adding custom speed-loaders in record time are from another planet. Which one is it?

[pjc50]

This is like asserting that because Usain Bolt exists nobody needs to drive a car.

[Annatar]

I've no idea who Usain Bolt is (or what it is, if it is a thing), so no clue what you are attempting to tell me with that allegory. No rows returned from the database. To me, it looks like

"cats are furry. Your argument is invalid."

Now, is "Hacker News" supposed to be where the information technology elite gathers, or is that a gross misnomer these days?

[taejo]

I don't think it's grossly unfair to assume people know the name of the fastest human being in the world.

It's also fine not to know, but your comment assumes we know who or what, for example, "allegory", "database", "cats" and "misnomer" are. My point is that every discussion assumes some knowledge, and if you lack it you can just look it up, or ask, without making allegories about cats and databases and huffing and puffing about information technology elites.

[Annatar]

Is this a site for IT elite or isn't it?

[segfaultbuserr]

> It just takes ages.

It doesn't have to be slow, sometimes it can be quick, but the precondition is that it takes the most talented engineers in the field to do it...

[scarejunba]

The point is to be capable of doing this without being some sort of superstar you can name who's dedicated themselves to the craft.

[Annatar]

There is no replacement for dedication to the craft.

[scarejunba]

I mean, there is hella replacement for craft: industrial precision. Like you can write fucking fast code now without having to ASM that shit. And no one is building a revolutionary microprocessor with his hands. That shit is going in the machine.

[Annatar]

The machine cannot replace craftsmanship. Soldering transistors and writing small, fast code are two completely unrelated activities.

[tripzilch]

You're deliberately missing the point just to name-drop some scene names?

[Annatar]

No, I'm making a point: if "Hacker News" is supposed to be where the information technology elite is, then what kind of "elite" is it if editing a filesystem in situ is considered impossible without the source code? Or is anyone who can turn on a computer these days and boot some kind of an OS program to dabble with the computer a hacker now, so the bar has been dropped to the ground altogether? Are we now all inclusive here too, is that how bad things have gotten? Maybe I'm completely wrong, and hacking has been changed so nowadays it's completely disassociated from being competent?