I've been thinking about the future of RCE for a while (not least due to my own choice of work!). Clearly there's increasing interest in the professional world due to malware analysis, vulnerability testing and the wider field of security, but it seems like with the increasing complexity and user-friendly nature of applications and operating systems there's less opportunity for people to jump in as hobbyists (no more "illegal operation" dialogs with dumps of register information to pique curiosity, for a start).

Where do you see things going? Are the old-school reversers a dying breed? Any anecdotes or comments welcome.

And a question for the admins: What're the traffic stats like? What've the trends been over the last however-many years? If anyone has access to the stats from other forums or crackmes.de or the like, that'd be interesting to see too.

I think the future of OS will belong to the web, with minimum OS Kernel other OS specific handling code. (See Google OS).

So, get ready for some hard core Javascript debugging

Howdy,

The stats for this place have been pretty much even for many years.
You have good and bad months but for the most part, the last 12 months have seen an average of 250678 per month.

That number has been consistent for a few years now.

Was it better? Yep it was, but that was a long time ago.

So has it changed? Yes.
The interest in what is being reversed has changed but that
just attracts new people while others retire.
You are quite correct in what people are looking to do.
With warez being rampant, there is no need to learn how to steal.
The emphasis now is to get a good job in protection,
virii analysis, pen testing etc;

It's just the natural order that the older of us move to the side and the new
bloods come in and advance us further.
Without that we would have been dead a long time ago.

Woodmann

Aye, I'm just interested to know if it's a different sort of crowd. Not trying to question the idea of progress and change, just... analysing it, as ever

Thanks for the stats. I'm guessing that's page views rather than unique visitors?

No, that's unique "Visits", as defined when a remote site makes a request for a page on the server for the first time, and within a specific timeout period (30 min.) As long as the same site keeps making requests within the timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. </definition>

So the server gets around

8000 Visits/day (all areas - forum, Collaborative Libraries, rss feeds, archives, hosted sites,...)

100,000 Hits/day (the total number of requests made to the server)...

40,000 Pages views/day (actual page being requested, and not all of the individual items that make it up, such as graphics)

Kayaker

Many old timers have moved on but check back in from time to time. The RCE is still alive and doing well. Traffic waxes and wanes, no problem.

kugi