On 7/28/10 11:37 PM, James McKenzie wrote:
Describe 'reverse engineer'. There is looking at the input/outputs of a
module with no knowledge of the code of the module (called 'black' box)
and then there is decoding to the machine code level ('white' box or
'gray' box.) There is a reason that Tandy versus IBM stuck. Tandy
watched what happened when an IBM PC booted on power up with a DOS disk
in the machine (DOS remember was stolen and had been around as source
code) and found that the Operating System queried a specific location in
memory for the letters IBM. They did that and made a better BIOS. The
company is now known as Phoenix. Other companies did a line-by-line
decode of the BIOS and that got them in a bunch of trouble. That is why
'black box' is acceptable, but 'white' or 'gray' box is not.
James McKenzie
Very interesting paragraph ... I wanted to see if the forum would
tolerate my asking a question on this.
If doing a "black-box" only job of "reverse engineering" requires one
to
load memory with a trademark, how does this fall into the realm of
acceptable?
Curiosity only on this question, as it would seem to me that such would
be an acknowledgment of ownership (as opposed to some random memory load
for "validation check"?),
Thanks,
Paul