Reverse-Engineering Apple Dictionary (2020)
fmentzer.github.io
Reverse-Engineering Apple Dictionary (2020)
1–10 of 61 posts
Re: Reverse-Engineering Apple Dictionary (2020)
#2For anyone else needing to tackle something like this, its definitely worth checking out Binwalk [1]. It is meant for extracting firmware but it works decently well on most files-in-files type data formats.
Re: Reverse-Engineering Apple Dictionary (2020)
#3It seems highly likely (given that this is a dictionary and requires fast lookups) that you're reverse engineering something like CEVFS (i.e. a virtual file system for compressing a database). Which is why the dictionary is broken into chunks... these are the compressed pages of the database.
Re: Reverse-Engineering Apple Dictionary (2020)
#4That's awesome!
But be aware (i.e. "beware") that Apple can pull the rug out of unpublished APIs, without warning.
I have been caught out, by this, myself.
Re: Reverse-Engineering Apple Dictionary (2020)
#5I assume one reason Apple has made it more challenging to extract the dictionary resources is in order to satisfy licensing constraints with the dictionary authors. I wonder if they'd block an app like this through the App Store submission process, if submitted.
Re: Reverse-Engineering Apple Dictionary (2020)
#6I assume one reason Apple has made it more challenging to extract the dictionary resources is in order to satisfy licensing constraints with the dictionary authors. I wonder if they'd block an app like this through the App Store submission process, if submitted.
I’d definitely assume this would be a copyright problem if used in an app.
Re: Reverse-Engineering Apple Dictionary (2020)
#7I assume one reason Apple has made it more challenging to extract the dictionary resources is in order to satisfy licensing constraints with the dictionary authors. I wonder if they'd block an app like this through the App Store submission process, if submitted.
I suspect it’s more likely they have a bunch of internal frameworks for creating, accessing, and distributing simple databases (something akin to SQLite).
So the difficulty we’re seeing here isn’t deliberate obfuscation, but rather just an dev using a database structure to make app design and word lookup easier.
If there really was licensing concerns I would expect there to at-least be some basic encryption, not just some basic compression.
Re: Reverse-Engineering Apple Dictionary (2020)
#8This is fun. I have another idea: I'd be interested on calling Siri from the command line. Even if using private APIs. (But without hacky fake drivers, or accessibility tools)
Re: Reverse-Engineering Apple Dictionary (2020)
#9would be really really cool if someone could make a small script to convert these into a format understandable by dict://
Re: Reverse-Engineering Apple Dictionary (2020)
#10I assume one reason Apple has made it more challenging to extract the dictionary resources is in order to satisfy licensing constraints with the dictionary authors. I wonder if they'd block an app like this through the App Store submission process, if submitted.
I’d definitely assume this would be a copyright problem if used in an app.
Yes, a lot of people involved in dictionary processing are worried about copyright!
After I wrote my post about Apple's dictionary files, I got a mysterious email showing up in my inbox. The email was from someone who's spent some time writing code to do the same thing, but doesn't want to post it under his own name in case he falls fowl of his country's DMCA equivalent. Crazy. He said I could post his code under the condition that I took his name off it.