Reverse engineering

Adam Agnew agnew at cs.umd.edu
Tue May 20 22:51:00 CEST 2003


On 21 May 2003, ollie lho wrote:
>
> If you are tracing the code with some kind of debugger rather than
> disassembly the binary image, does it matter if the image is encrypted ?
>

Interesting question. You didn't subvert the encryption, the program
decrypted itself! But in the US, i think this would be debatable and
would probably boil down too how much you can spend on lawyers...

Speaking of such things, has anyone ever seen a license on VGA Roms? More
specific than just a copyright i mean? I was considering how one could get
past the problem of making commercial solutions when we don't know much
about the video chipset. The solution in my mind is to sell the commercial
appliance with the linux distro and the default commercial BIOS. On first
boot up by the customer, the linux distro extracts the VGA ROM from
memory and installs it along with linuxBIOS. Subsequent reboots then
would use that VGA blob. This way, the company selling the appliance
didn't copy the VGA ROM, it was done by the user. And I would think the
user is alright under fair use? Is my logic faulty?

>
> >
> > This is all American law, of course.  And, one should note, that even
> > though Connectix won, they went out of business due to legal expenses
> > (as far as I recall).  I think that is called being "dead right".
> >
>
> If Connetix won, why can it ask Sony for the legal expense ? With
> some additional "punishment" ?
>

Don't lose any sleep worrying about what happened to Connectix.
http://www.connectix.com/about/acquisition_win.html


------------------
Adam Agnew
Independent Contractor
www.adamagnew.com





More information about the coreboot mailing list