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Reverse-engineering is cheap now

simonwillison.net

41–42 of 42 posts

Re: Reverse-engineering is cheap now

#41

what's the deal with empty half-a-page-of-text posts lately? is this like the ultimate form of "headline is all you need"? I came here wanting to see after-action-report of someone actually using Ai or wtvr for reverse-engineering. Instead I got "I heard it was so. The end"

I call this type of post on my blog a "note" - they're effectively self-hosted tweets: https://simonwillison.net/notes/

They're not really intended to be widely discussed outside of my site, it's more of a way of dropping small thoughts into my blog rather than keeping them exclusive to Twitter or Bluesky or Mastodon.

Re: Reverse-engineering is cheap now

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeSSM is already open source. It's reversed Subaru SSM diagnostic protocol and wrapped a tool around it. That was ~15 years ago, long before any of the AI stuff.

The point was rather that reverse engineering the CAN-bus protocol or existing software that already does it for your vehicle of interest is now by far easier through the usage of AI models than it was before - FWIW I could have done it before with the technical skills I have but ROI for me personally was too low. Now I am really considering it.

Oh, yeah. Agree with that point.
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