Hi,

i know this place has a lot of 'brains'.

since years i've seen much peoples here learning to code and reverse but since months,semm that 'old' crackers generation turned from the darkside to the commercial side.

Not dumb,as they reversed almost every protections around,they know how to do the right one.

lets take starforce,with a minimal investigation it's fair easy to see that 'old' crackers are behind this gem.

my question is,is the recent crackers generation more lazy to learn to reverse new challenges?

it was a time,all games were cracked in some min/hours/days but now i see most games (sf3) released with tools to pseudo-emulate the cd/dvd,have to remove the cable plug,burning with crazy settings and more...

where's the power of the new generation?

plugged onto ps2,xbox all days long?
being consumed by the commercial industry generating some brainless youthness?..

well i'm a bit confused asking that here but it's shame to see that almost futur generations are not interested to understand 'whats behind'

*ethical free comments*

any reactions would be appreciated to understand the pov.

thanks!

This trend has been "noticed" and there are efforts underway to change that situation - I blame it on the proliferation of boards that offer links to rapidshare, and megaupload and the like - it's just too damn easy to get what you want - no incentive to learn, myself, I'm just the curious type that doesn't believe the axiom "if it aint broke don't fix it", I'll reverse a target just for fun, even if I plan on buying it - a quote I've seen on one of those boards sums it up "software is like sex, it's always better when it's free".

IMHO -

SiGiNT

IMHO the basic novelty are protections using some sort of virtual machine - or a similar scheme of artificially generated complexity - for replacing protected code/data sequences. Time and CPU speed now work in favour of the protectionists as developing a new VM (including compiler etc.) is done much quicker than analysing the generated code - which may become larger (=more time-consuming to analyse) w/o serious performance hits - and developing 'solutions' on behalf of the cracker (=tracing tools, decompilers, recompilers). With a minimum of additional efforts the developer can integrate these machanisms with his software to a degree, where reconstructing the original code (which btw still is some kind of 'rule' among scene crackers) simply becomes infeasible.
In contrast to this former protections used to be crackable mostly by 'just having the right idea' and implementing it in a few lines of code - not disrespecting the great work and skills of the oldskoolers as most of the stuff considered usual and being documented well nowadays has been 'new' to them at that time.
Also the software market (especially for video games) has grown a lot within the last few years and therefore the demand for effective copy protections.
This means plenty of ressources are available to improve protection schemes.
And finally the range of mechanisms used in protections grows permanently, which clearly raises the bar for fresh talent to start off with many of the current commercial-grade protections.

So, the bottom line is: Crackers aren't any worse nowadays (though many 'oldskoolers' tend to tell you so ), but protections have advanced a lot.


regards,
Pyrae


P.S. Apologies for the structure of my sentences (yes, there is some)...

ARTeam's main mission is to release only tutorials also to counteract this tendence, personally I'm perfectly on the same line, hope other will follow too.

Anyway all the fields of innovation (and RCE was a new thing at +HCU times) have a first burst where the most mature hanging fruits are easily taken, the problem is after this to get the other higher fruits. At the moment we are at this level, to do something effectively new is not so easy and requires each time more study than before.
Debugging loaders, system driver and other new nice things were not so common in early days, when HVIEW was enough for almost all apps.

well,i agree.

none offense against some protectionists but its unfair that people who cracked a lot of software and sometime ruining companies are now using this art to gain money.

Kinda ironic...

sf3 like protection have some nice days engineering money and killing the scene game area.

anyway,its a way to greets the talent of some crackers and the result of those p2p brainless distribution...

thanks for the answers mates!

why is that unfair? ironic, perhaps, but i don't see it as unfair

indeed, black and white hats ever existed since the early times and often are the same person with two hats ;-)

i got white, black and gray hats, so i can cover all possibilities heh

How do you think that Physicians learn their craft??

By cracking a lot of people, some running a hospital then using their art to gain money. . .

Ironic??

Howdy,

Things change.

As it has turned out, years of practicing RCE can be favorable on a job resume.
All good crackers have multiple skills in RCE and seem to have more talents then some of those coming out of school with a degree in only one discipline.

If you have a brain full of code and spent the last four years living it, there is probably nothing that you cannot do.
If getting a job as a result of doing something you enjoy is wrong, what should you do ? Go to work each day miserable and hating to even get out of bed ?

Now, why are things the way they are now ?

I suppose it could be a matter of time. Maybe no one wants to spend a week on a target. Maybe they are a "casual" cracker who do not posses the skills. Maybe people just want stuff for free and cant find a "crack" so they will use whatever ready made tools are available.

I, like a lot of the older crackers, have "real life" to deal with and just dont have the time. If you have a family with children you understand this.
We fall behind on the newest things and for our small amount of time to "play", need to use ready made tools just to "stay in touch".

Woodmann

It does seem that overall intelligence is somewhat decreased, as these days most "programmers" don't even completely understand how a computer works, and there is only a small group who knows the most - this group being composed of those who do RCE, and those who design the famously difficult protection systems.

The decline in knowledge of Asm is also partially related to this... the proliferation of new high-level-languages shows that programmers are just reluctant to spend any amount of time writing good code, opting instead for the machine to do it for them. This is mostly for reasons having to do with development time, and because time is financially responsible for this rush in development, it could be said that money is the force that drives this whole movement.

As for myself, I'm one of the older reversers, and have many other things to do besides reversing. However, I tend to crack a lot of software very quickly and on an "as-needed" basis - if I need a software to do a particular task, I find a suitable one on the Internet, download the trial, crack it within an hour, and use it for often no more than a few days before deleting it because I have no more use for it. If I can't get it working within an hour, I resort to finding a crack because I don't have the time. However, judging by the large number of dismally protected software that is available, I can say with certainty that there are very few who know about reverse-engineering at all.

LLXX,

Your policies mirror my own, most of the stuff I work on is either just for fun, or I needed maybe once or twice and can't justify the price. As for the development of the higher level languages .NET is ridiculously easy to crack, and it's the latest and greatest! (My son is even taking a college course because this is the "wave of the future". You are going to see a lot of packing in use with that one.

SiGiNT

As Woodmann says, it's all about available time. Personally I crack to gain knowledge of how things work, which means I often only get 1/2 or 3/4 of the way to a crack. Once I understand how the protection has been implemented and how to defeat it I discard the target and get on with something else. I don't have the time and don't see the value in doing the last 1/4 of effort to turn my manual crack (patch code at runtime with sice etc) into a "releasable" crack (loader, proper patch etc). I understand the protection so I've achieved my goal, I'm not particularly interested in releasing cracks into the wild.

Besides, as LLXX says, so much software these days is "protected" by people who only think in a high-level language and who don't understand that all their fancy "protection" boils down to a couple of jne's. It's rare (IMO) to find protection that isn't tool-based (Yoda, Arm, Asprotect etc) but is effective.

About 3 months ago Woodmann sent me an e-mail relating very much to this subject (sorry now I didn't reply ;-) ).

One of the parts thats stuck out at me was 1 phrase; "you can get a very good paying gig as a cracker these days", software protection, intellectual rights protection / DRM / content management, whatever you want to call it, the fact is its big business and the biggest names in the game have all jumped on the bandwagon.

.....and therein lies the problem; I made a list of some of the biggest cracking names in the game that I've known over the years and every single one of them either falls into the category of :

1. Real-life programmer / IT specialist - No time or interest in studying the latest protections. or/
2. Employed in the game (anti-virus research, copy protection, reverse engineering, selling copy protection solutions).

This trend imho is irreversible, the downside of all this progress has been that the level of knowledge required to even start in the reverse engineering game has reached a bar that few newbies are ever going to find the determination to reach.

Imagine, you've just done your first few easy cracks then encounter Armadillo or ASPR or god knows what and the only advice you get is "read the 78 page PE document specification" and "learn the Win32 API", the alternative is download the ready made patch / keygen, its not rocket science to work out what most are going to do.

I think a few people around here have advanced plans of how they'd like to see this trend reversed, I'd like to think eventually it will happen, so step forward any $ rich philanthropists who'd like to fund a reversing academy ;-).

Regards

CrackZ.

Hey, I enjoy being "employed in the game"


I think that there are still plenty of good tutorials/essays being written today for modern protections. I just wish more of them were in English for folks like me


Zero used to host the Reverse Engineering Academy (REA). He and his associates are now in the process of developing REA2.

hi,

hot topic

i formyself agree most with woodmans answer, but have a bit to add of my personal thougts: i think its probably harder to see the brilliant through the enormous masses.
I also see there was a trend: "shit we don't have enough it professionals".
i was in 3 big companies after ~1998 and everybody screamed for "it professionals". there just weren't enough. what happened? they put every f*ckin idiot into a "microsoft admin training", "it driving license", "oracle dba training", built up "consulting companies", where ie 2 month high speed trained "win admins", then came on site to do a particular job. there were maybe 1% of talented ppl. others were ie truck drivers before (nothing against if someone does it then good, i have nothing against druck drivers its really only an example, i could also say mailmen) ...

so the rest were totally dumbasses who could only work by manual and did not have any clue what exactly a netmask is, etc .... i want to say suddenly "on the market" appeared tons of ppl calling themselves experts, or even coming presented as expert consultants. everybody wanted the money.

ok i agree not only "in it working ppl" do RE, i know. but this general dumbness has grown much during the time. there were always just a few who really
were interested in what they doing and becoming real experts, but since then the majority in IT is not trained from ground up.

what i mean is many probably started as child/teenager to code asm, crack the first games they liked on a C64 or similar. we had a different approach to "that all" and were excited and sucked in every bit of the OS etc.

now ppl come out of university learning java as "an elegant programming language" - the f*ck it is LoL.

overall - the hardcore guy is harder to find i think and does probably have problems finding other ppl, as everyone on the market screams "i am the best"

just look at the zillions of damn bad designed webpages, unusable, etc, built by all the experts on the planet - you know what i mean.

on the bright side - its good to have places like _this forum_ where ppl can figure eachothers level and come together

cheers, 0xf001

Hi everybody,

Well, we had this the very same debate at anticrack.de some time ago and the conclusions were quite pessimistic. Personally, i totally agree with Woodmann's point of view and with the reasons you all enumerate above: lazyness, lack of low-level background/interest, etc. It's true there is a very reduced group of people doing real cracking, but their activity is never mirrored in the forums, everything is kept private. On parallel, it's pretty annoying to see the same trivial question posted over and over.

Interesting as well to mention the evolution of protections towards painfully-long schemes, like virtual machines. The chances of cracking a protection having a bright idea are very reduced now. In fact, Virtual-Machines in my opinion pose a real threat over all the RCE community.

There are ups and downs in the scene. VX groups have almost disappeard and perhaps this will happen as well to most RCE forums. I don't think this tendence can be corrected. In fact, i don't think is worth combating it.

Regards,
Havok.

hehe, but you would let us discuss what we want here, do you havok ?

*g* you show ineresting thoughts, but pls don't try to stop discussions which have been posted on other forums. come on, its off topic, see it more relaxed. the initiator of the thread might not read anticrack.de, and so do not all members here. if this thread isn't valuable to you, or you even get annoyed by it, don't participate, simple or? (so could i have ignored your little "we allready know that, your _trivial_ thoughts" sentence, but it annoyed _me_ LoL)

regards, 0xf001

what i mean is many probably started as child/teenager to code asm, crack the first games they liked on a C64 or similar. we had a different approach to "that all" and were excited and sucked in every bit of the OS etc...It's called curiosity but today everyone needs the easiest and quickest way. Only few have the curiosity to inspect, only few will look at the source of a tool/program... why? Because they have the final product, why should they have to study how does it really works!?!
Do you want a simple example? Take a look at the source of the anti-attach plugin I posted some days ago; I voluntarily putted inside two errors (they are not errors but it's something useless for the final result), only few downloaded the file but no one noticed it... Why? Because they needs the final product......

actually, as someone who regularly screens résumés, i can say that it's not that hard to differentiate between the people who know their stuff vs. the people who don't.

hehe,

yes disavoved, if you allready have the contact its quite easy to distinguish.
i was talking about _finding_, not differentiating

regards, 0xf001

TI99A TMS99000 16 bit processor - I read in the manual that it was impossible to copy a copy protected Basic program on tape or disk - it took me a couple of months aquiring the hardware/software and knowledge of assembler to prove them wrong - but that's what the incentive is - protecting a program is like offering up a puzzle to solve or saying "it can't be done" , at least that is what gives me the incentive - the frustrating part is having to learn what others have already accomplished before you can actually do some creative reversing - even with a simple app. that can be nopped and/or jumped to make it work, I seldom will take that avenue anymore I'd rather go farther back in the code and actually generate the values that the original code tests - may take a little longer but you actually learn a little more that way.

SiGiNT

The +HCU... the glorious times of +Fravia and the +ORC... I still remember... now, very few universities actually have RCE courses, but from what I've heard, they teach it in a very theoretical and boring manner. However, I have taught my daughter some Asm and am planning to teach her basic RCE too, just so that I won't feel like I'm contributing to the decline in knowledge I think they should start offering Asm and RCE courses in Intermediate School, since I feel that it's best to start teaching them when they're young, and to teach them what programming is really about.
Certainly shows how people think about programming today... all these new developments like java and other "high-level languages", "structured programming", ... we're moving farther and farther away from the real functioning of the machine, and restricting ourselves to writing restrained, limited, inefficient code. With each level above Asm, there is a decrease in creativity and utilisation of the entire capability of the machine, accompanied by an increase in conformance to restrictive design principles and code structure. Programmers that learn at such a high level of abstraction don't fully understand the function of the computer itself; they cannot think of a better way to do something even if the machine can, all because the language he is working in does not allow it. Now Asm, that is an elegant programming language!

Because programmers know less about the true functioning of the machine, and everyone in general excepting the few who do, there is a decrease in the amount of people who know, and consequently a decrease in the number of those who know reversing. Could this be a plan by the software corporations to prevent reversing by attempting to gradually eliminate all the low-level knowledge there is?
I find that true as well. Cracking a difficult protection is like solving a puzzle, and I find the whole "protectionist vs reverser" battle interesting. However, the level of protection employed on most of the software today is so trivial that defeating such is almost like routine work; sometimes I reverse more than the protection itself - going into the actual functioning of the program.
I do that too. As a result, I've collected a huge number of pseudo-hashing algorithms, many of which actually work well as hash algorithms (not to mention the few software that actually used the MD5 of the username as the serial number...) and are interesting to study too.

This isn't just restricted to RCE. Take a look at the games industry and you'll find demo coders working (and owning) some of the most well known software houses there are. The list of triple-A games that were coded/created by demosceners is long and distinguished. Software houses actively look for democoders to hire. It's for pretty much the same reason as RCE - the knowledge needed to code modern games is far beyond most people. The reverse is also true - the knowledge needed to compete in the modern demoscene is also far beyond most newbies.

You can substitute "RCE" and "games" for pretty much any aspect of the IT industry that requires real skill to master. Things haven't really changed, computers have just become more accessible. Add to that all the "distance learning courses" that will help you "master IT skills in just 2 weeks" and come with a "guaranteed job", the signal to noise ratio has steadily decreased.

As disavowed says, it's usually not hard to distinguish between people who know their stuff and people who don't. A lot of hiring is done by managers who can't make that distinction though, and who are impressed by an MCSE or "I can code javascript"...

hi everybody,

i haven't looked into the virii scene over the last years that much, but dispite there are still a few magz around, they are suffering probably really is what some say. the others say: everyday a new worm -> "virii not dead".
hmmmm. the demo scene is similar but MUCH alive (releases thumbarized at ie pouet.net ). they suffer from "ready made tools" like the produkkt etc. almost the same everywhere: masses of "no brainers" and below every here and then we get impressed by some new technique in any of these topics. same i see it with RCE: we can not expect everyday sthg totally new, the research takes time. so, has really sthg changed?
on this board we can probably "measure" it better. i somehow can't tell.

i think the whole DMCA stuff brings a new wave of things to play etc.
also the virtual machines are just great often !! yes not so easy patched, but still there exists winzip to learn cracking
so my opinion is: noone or nothing is really dying. I think even RCE can not _die_ simply because skilled ppl will not die _all_

to JAVA: it is not a language i like, yes hehe. what i meant in my post is: ppl don't know much about languages, get "trained" 1 of them, think this abstract brain wanking (sorry) is the ultimate and thats it. this way they are speaking to you. how cool and effficient java handles the virtual machine.
i would need to answer in form of a whole book until everyone would understand what i mean. when i try it short it sounds like i am bullshitting

i have nothing against higher language, many serve a nice purpose. that includes scripting languages like perl, python, ux shells, etc. just _java_ and _VB_ are things which in my opinion are not languages of real use.
(i know many ppl in the world use them, but that does not make them in any way "good".
whereby java indeed has at least a concept, its more that all ppl i meet programming java learned it at university. noone ever ever i met learned it because he wanted to. everything i see written in java is like "look, its possible to do it in java!! now its platform independent" LoL. argh. it hurts so much. probably that was the reason to write it? pls understand i have quite some background on _many_ languages and am not "only ASM freak".
just i havent yet seen any problem where i _needed_ java. and i am _long_ coding now (22 years practice)

WHY THE HELL infect openoffice with java????????? arhg!
could sum it up just to have it in there? to make it slower? to need the f'ckin virtual machine?

cheers, 0xf001

Ohhh that takes me back. My first "PC", bought it at Service Merchandise of all places.



You (or more precisely "they" can't eliminate all the low level knowledge, compilers and software protection programs (like dillo et al) would then cease to exist.


Coding in assembly is indeed one of the most elegant ways to write a program (or re-write ), the problem is it is not very effiecient from a maintainance standpoint and its worthless as a cross platform approach.

Could you imagine the insanity if FireFox was 100% asm code?


Back on topic (with an off topic thread), I think other people have hit on the main reasons...

Most would-be reversers probably get put off by the complexity of today's protection systems. Sure they can download and walk through a bunch of tutes, but its not as satisfying as doing the "real thing", and learning to walk before you run in today's world of RCE is a long process.

For myself, I'm happy with my limited reversing abilities and the chance to lurk in a forum that consistently has more informative posts than any other I frequent. I'll never be able to dump a program and rebuild it to functional, if for no other reason I lack the time to study the necessary information.

I disagree. Greater than 99% of the population will have zero need for such knowledge. Math, reading, etc. are much more important... schools have a hard enough time teaching the basics... there's no reason to burden the schools or the students with information that they'll almost certainly never use.


Abstraction is a good thing! Think of all the real-world systems that need to be programmed: stock exchanges, airline reservation/flight-planning systems, medical systems, etc... the developers will be able to implement much more in 6 months of high-level-coding than in 6 months of low-level-coding. Plus, efficiency of instructions isn't really much of a problem anymore. It's far more important to have efficient algorithims than to have efficient instruction-usage (which is another reason why universities teach algorithms more than they teach ASM). And of course we can't forget about code maintainability, portability, auditability/readability, all of which suck with ASM but are pretty good with high-level-languages.


Do you think the people who would be making such decisions know what reversing even is?

I was discussing ASM with an old timer the other day. This person has been doing ASM programming of mainframes for quite a long period of time, but stated that he knew very little of modern personal pc's. I was trying to describe some of the common ASM instructions that are used on pc's and he said that what we are refering to as ASM is a higher level version of "true" ASM in that a simple command like "mov" would take multiple "true" ASM commands on the mainframe. Now why would I want to write five (or more) instructions to do what one instruction can do? This leads us to why we go to higher level languages. Time is money and if I can do it in 1 step versus 5, I save money. Not to mention that reading/changing 1 line of code is easier than reading/changing five (or more) lines of code. We want it faster and easier, and therefore cheaper.

Now, even though this person I was talking to is as close to an "expert" in ASM coding on his platform, I wonder how well that knowledge would transfer to interpreting pc based ASM. Still, the skills learned in constructing algorithims regardless of the language can be used as building blocks to move into coding other languages. Take any function in pseudocode and then put it into the programing language of your choice. My favorite discussions on this forum frequently occur when someone (usually Bilbo) takes a section of ASM code and puts it into pseudocode. From that point, I can see exactly what is happening in the code and can in turn transfer it to something that lies within my personal comfort zone.

I do think that there are still some really fantastic reversers out there. Take, for example, the group H2O. Some of the work done by this group is pretty impressive from my perspective (nice dongle emulation in _ubase 3), but most of groups of this caliber take great precautions to protect their identities and I have yet to see any tutorials come from these type of groups.

Anyway, that's my two cents (plus a penny or two)

Rackmount

whats bad in that model of protectionists is that some years ago they were in battle against industries,commercial etc and now that they reach a good level of knowledges they use those knowledges to help the commercial and industries to earn more and more money.

and what should happen in this case is the new generation of crackers who reverse and corrupt (a lil'bit) the business of those companies but what i wanted to say is,this new generation is not ready to take the course,thats sad...

Geesh, Clueless,

Of course you'll learn how to dump a packed .exe and you'll gain more knowledge, you're here aren't you?

SiGiNT

There's a lot of high level programming bashing here.. I think it is highly unjustified. ASM isn't the best of the best. It's been shown over and over that for huge programs, the complexity is so large, that even an alpha-plus programmer will have a huge difficulty understanding it all... So the benefit you might get locally will more than likely be negatively offset elsewhere because you couldn't possibly see 'the big picture' and that's not even considering the amount of time that will need to be put into the problem.

I don't see why there's even a language debate here, just use the one that's suited for the task that you are doing. There's a reason why all these different languages exist. You, as a programmer, should be able to pick the right one for your task. If you are just going for ASM with your eyes closed, you're as foolish as anyone else. The same thing goes for algorithms or data structures, if you are always using the same thing (e.g. hash tables) without considering what problem it is applied on, you are a fool.

As for Java: I enjoy programming in Java, it allows me to do things like rapid prototyping of new ideas in a day, where as it'd take me a week to do it in assembly. You shouldn't think that everyone that programs is Java is just another idiot that comes out of "IT-school". As disavowed said, choosing a good algorithm is a lot more important than having efficient instruction usage ("I just saved 3 memory accesses in 100 LOC! yay!", and that is why they are taught in high level languages. People don't want to be spending their time on the language, they want to be spending it on the algorithm.


All the languages have the same expressing power. Now, if you intend to make profitable software, and you are making software targetting users on platform X, but for almost no extra cost you can also support those on platform Y, you probably will consider it. But if you have to rewrite the entire application because it's underlying architecture is different, are you going to do it? You should know, you're a linux advocate.

Anyway, I don't get some of the comments. Have you guys been living under a rock for the past 10-15 years?

Why do so many people believe that most crackers were cracking "to fight big business / the industry"? I think most of us did it just for fun. This is one of the reasons why crackmes/reversemes are so popular now.

I can already dump a packed exe , its the rebuilding and making it functional again that so far eludes me.

I simply lack the needed time to learn it - my wife and three daughters all conspire to keep my free time as close to zero as possible.

If it weren't for my job I'd have no time to spend here.

Thats an architectural difference, not a higher or lower level programming language difference (RISC vs CISC if you will).

That said, there is no argument that the newer "Macro" assemblers can certainly be made to perform like much higher level languages.

As to which is "best", the basic argument is just plain silly. You use the language thats appropriate for the job.

Need fast, tight and small then use ASM.

Need cross platform capabilities, good maintainability and (relativly) easy to read source code use C or Java.

Need to prove you have almost no programming skills at all use VB.

CluelessNoob,

I do understand that the differences between the two versions of ASM are mainly due to the system(s) they are designed to work on. What I was commenting on was that even the ASM most of us are familiar with can be viewed as being a higher level language when viewed from another architecture. Relativity strikes again! I also don't believe that the intention was to bash one language versus another, as like you say, they all serve a purpose. What I think most would agree on is that to be able to reverse on a pc, one must have some amount of knowledge in pc based ASM. No, you don't need to be able to program a major application in ASM from scratch. (On a totally off-the-point digression, what is this "scratch" thing? I, for one, try to never eat anything that is advertised as being made from "scratch". Flakey biscuits made from scratch just like Grandma used to make!!! (Just what is Granny scratching!?! Where do those flakes come from!?!) Kinda hard to find that appealing...ok, now back to our regularly scheduled programing) But, as all the disassemblers/debuggers that I am aware of give you ASM as output, it seems that to know what is going on in the code you will need ASM knowledge.

I'm up to a nickle...

Rackmount

Howdy,





There is no need for such quotes.

I think that some statements have been misconstrued/misunderstood.

Woodmann

(Have you all forgotten about the protector Ryan created??)

hi all, esp doug!

i was not able to read all answers in detail but with speed reading it seems i have been misunderstood a bit you _really_ got me wrong! but i agree i was uneccesarry emotional. sorry.

please what i wrote about java is my personal opinion. as i stated i have nothing against high level languages, and i am using them as well (alltogether mainly asm, C, C++, perl, shell, php, javascript, all that on multiple platforms (win, lin, ux), multiple toolkits/environments (tk, qt, kde, win32, mfc), sometimes even VB, and i am sure i forgot some) blablabla. i totally understand when to use which kind of language - i wrote it like "they all serve different purposes" or similar.

i personally got a bit excited and probably bashed java too much, for that i apologize a little. still java is not a language i ever needed or wanted to learn in more detail (i did some vector gfx animations, scrollers, and that was it then). i can with many other languages stay platform independent, even with C and ie Qt. i meant i personally don't like it and i don't want to use it, and hate its VM thats all hehe.

a friend of mine and excellent coder swears on java. we have had quite some debates, no one can convince the other of his opinion. i am sorry i didn't say all java programmers are stupid, and am sorry if anyone got it this way.
i used it as probably bad example. without wanting to bother you explaining this example too much (i think it was not so valuable anyway) i meant that i to often meet ppl coding java which were a bit arrogant explaining that everything else is "not a that sophisticated language" and then use it for a 5-100 liner which can be done in some lines of another language - platform independent, elegant and _without a VM_. i accept ppl coding java! LoL

regards, 0xf001

hehe,

and i know ryans stuff very well. i figured his keys and encryption/hashing routines, the modified init values for ie MD5, .... its not really a protection to use pcode - just you need to patch WKTVBDE debugger (see my post on http://www.woodmann.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5403) in order to be able to debug his - uuuuuh OCX

btw i can do the same in some lines of perl LoL. i made a proof of concept of a self decrypting perl "executable" having a pre encrypted / signed body. no way to "crack" it LoL (shall i put it on my homepage and sell it as the worlds 2nd uncrackable protection? hahaha)!!

regards, 0xf001

Ahh, the lack of one emoticon can really mess up sarcasm.

It was a joke, I actually have done some fairly cool stuff in VB. Sure it could have been done in C, but VB is just soooo easy sometimes.