291–300 of 425 posts
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If it’s a hobby project why don’t you just pirate it? Honest question.
Uh, no. So if you are making a small plane hobby project, it is okay to steal from the department store nearby. A hobby project is for your enjoyment. Pay for your shit. Simple. I can understand a 14-year-old teenager doing that after his parents refused to purchase the game.
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Would you mind answering some questions if you're familiar with the area (edit: hah, just noticed you posted to the OP to this whole thread.); What are some examples of firms that are involved in this work? Is it mostly a collection of smaller shops/individual contractors? After a cursory search, I seem to be seeing a lot of groups/labs comprised of relatively few people. Why are there so many references to high bill…
My office is in the same building as BitDefender. I casually talked to some of the guys and they do use IDA Pro in their malware research department. They mostly hire their researchers straight out of college if they have high C proficiency and train them internally to use IDA Pro. I know my comment isn't exactly what you asked, but I hope it clears some light.
Also partially OT, just wanted to say that I was a sort of college-roommate with one of their present-day senior security researchers in the early 2000s and to this day I remember that person as one of the most code-obsessed persons I have ever met, and I say that in a good way.
He was looking at almost every program running on our room's computer (yes, we only had one computer in our room of 4 or 5, no laptops) as a thing to be "broken apart"/analyzed/made sense of, he had a state of mind and a way of looking at things when it came to computers that I've never met since then at any other computer programmers (I've mostly met desktop, backend and front-end programmers, I'm a data-obsessed person myself). I realized in the meantime that in order to enter this "computer security" field and especially in order to be good at it you need to have a different set of skills and especially a different way of looking at things compared to other computer programmers.
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I wouldn't say the market is doing that, government funded tool being released as FOSS is opposite to "the market".
Yeah, but it is the market - it's just not a perfect market; you know, the kind that can't exist.
Market forces are often reined in, eg by human rights, those things aren't part of the market operating they're mitigations of the damaging effects. In this case it's an external force (gov action), not the market, that has created the availability of the product.
Why this is important (for those uninitiated): - Ghidra is basically the first real competitor to IDA Pro, the extremely expensive and often pirated state-of-the-art software for reverse engineering. Nothing else has come close to IDA Pro. - Ghidra is open-source, IDA Pro is not. - Ghidra has a lot of really cool features that IDA Pro doesn't, such as decompiling binaries to pseudo-C code. - It's also collaborative,…
i would say these both tools ,as well as r2 have their own merits and weak points, and it would be good not to exclude one and take the other as better, but to have them compliment eachother in your arsenal.
in the end if you want quality, then manual work is always better than these opinionated tools, and sometimes that is required, so really the tools offer different perspectives / opinions of the same thing, and that is valuable in any case. when you run into the limit of 1 tool ,another might just fill that gap.
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> All software should be free, The marginal cost of one more user is exactly zero All bridges should be free, The marginal cost of one more user is effectively zero.
While I agree with your overall point, this isn't the greatest analogy, because a finite number of users are able to use a bridge simultaneously. A bridge with too many users is called a traffic jam.
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For the lazy: > Restrictions. Subject to applicable copyright, trade secret and other laws, you are permitted under this License to reverse engineer or de-compile the Software but you may not alter, duplicate, modify, rent, lease, loan, sublicense, create derivative works from or provide others with the Software in whole or part, or transmit or communicate any of the Software over a network in order to share it with…
> create derivative works from That's pretty much the only reason one would reverse engineer it, in this context - and it's somewhat misleading to suggest otherwise.
From someone who does binary reverse engineering full time, in my experience, BinaryNinja, Hopper, radare2, etc are toys compared to IDA Pro + Hex Rays Decompiler. The quality of the results and the features supported are unmatched... until now. I haven’t spent too much time with ghidra yet but it’s the real deal. The output of the decompiler looks alright (not complete garbage like I’ve seen with other tools). Even…
I’m a casual bystander who has only played with these tools, but I’ve been interested in this field for a long time. Do you think that radare2’s UI is a step forward? I like the Unix-esque command line and how composable everything feels. IDA (and now Ghidra) feel like an IDE, while radare2 feels more like Vim.