RosAsm disassembler output vs. IDA Pro
Roy Jones
I was looking at the disassembly output of RosAsm. I understand that you
are currently working on the disassembler to bring it up to 2 click
reassembly.
Is the end goal to produce something like the output of IDA Pro(industrial
grade commented asm listing)? Or something more along the lines of
Cristina Cifuentes' DCC decomiler(decompile to c source code with asm
subroutines) for dos programs.
Perhaps these links
Home of the DCC decompiler
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~cristina/dcc.html
I believe that IDA Pro builds upon many of the ideas from Dr. Cifuentes'
reverse engineering research.
If you don't have a copy, the freeware edition of IDA 4.1(Text mode,win32)
is available at:
http://www.datarescue.be/downloadfreeware.htm - Current status of
freeware edition
http://www.themel.com/idafree.zip - one host for the freeware edition.
Size: 12.0 MB (12,522,567 bytes)
Betov
news:opr18t3s...@news.la.sbcglobal.net:
> Betov,
>
> I was looking at the disassembly output of RosAsm. I understand that
> you are currently working on the disassembler to bring it up to 2
> click reassembly.
>
> Is the end goal to produce something like the output of IDA
> Pro(industrial grade commented asm listing)? Or something more along
> the lines of Cristina Cifuentes' DCC decomiler(decompile to c source
> code with asm subroutines) for dos programs.
Thanks for the DCC Link Roy. I didn't know of this one.
Yes, when finished, the RosAsm Disassemblies will look
like DCC' ones, but, in Assembly Language, with the
usual HLL Macros expressions for the constructs, the
restitutions of all possible names, user Names for
Menus, OS Structures and Structures Members Names, and
Api calls Parameters usual Names.
Actualy, only the Menu Names, and the Api calls members
Names are effective.
In its the actual state, the "Two-Clicks-Disassembler-
Reassembler" is effective on most small Demos. I test,
essentially, on the Assembly Demos, for now, because,
1) they are often times _terrific_, at a construction
point of view, and usually very small. This makes them
very good candidates for such tests, as, trying to
understand what is going wrong is much easier with
those ones... and as many things may be going wrong
with thoses terrific organisations... (Some are
really incredible... :))
Yet tons of small but difficult problems to solve, but
i hope to be over with the recognitions (recognition of
what is Data and what is code), in one or two week(s)...
We will implement the Structures and Structures Members
Names after this... The Maintainer who is doing the
Structures collection work should also be over in one
or two week(s) with this demential amount of work. ;)
Betov.
< http://betov.free.fr/RosAsm.html >
Randall Hyde
"Roy Jones" <mhc...@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message
news:opr18t3s...@news.la.sbcglobal.net...
> Betov,
>
> I was looking at the disassembly output of RosAsm. I understand that you
> are currently working on the disassembler to bring it up to 2 click
> reassembly.
That's his goal.
While admirable, it is also mathematically impossible to achieve in
practice.
It'll probably wind up working with about 80% of the object files out there
without too many mistakes.
>
> Is the end goal to produce something like the output of IDA Pro(industrial
> grade commented asm listing)? Or something more along the lines of
> Cristina Cifuentes' DCC decomiler(decompile to c source code with asm
> subroutines) for dos programs.
His goal is quite simple - reverse engineering (i.e., yo, ho, ho).
RosAsm doesn't support libraries or separate compilation. So he
got this bright idea that by providing a disassembler, people could
disassemble other library code and cut and paste the source code
into their programs. A rather poor way to implement library functionality,
if you ask me. But as the tool is useful for other things, more power
to him. I still think that he would be better off taking the effort and
adding true linkage support to his assembler :-)
>
> Perhaps these links
> Home of the DCC decompiler
> http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~cristina/dcc.html
> I believe that IDA Pro builds upon many of the ideas from Dr. Cifuentes'
> reverse engineering research.
This is funny! You should have seen the posts he made earlier
(on the MASMForum board, IIRC) about how dry and boring
and worthless all those papers on decompilation were. He found
them unenlightening (IOW, they were probably above his head
so he decided he didn't need to figure out what was being said).
Rene is a loner. Despite a wealth of information out there (on
many subjects he's involved in, not just disassemblers), he figures
he knows all there is to know about everything and what he doesn't
know, he can figure out on his own. Sadly, he wastes a lot of time
reinventing a lot of wheels. His whole attitude towards library code
is a perfect example of his approach to research: "it's better to do
everything from scratch..."
>
> If you don't have a copy, the freeware edition of IDA 4.1(Text mode,win32)
> is available at:
> http://www.datarescue.be/downloadfreeware.htm - Current status of
> freeware edition
> http://www.themel.com/idafree.zip - one host for the freeware edition.
> Size: 12.0 MB (12,522,567 bytes)
He has already said that he will have nothing to do with commercial apps
(that aren't GPL).
His loss. One day he's going to wake up and realize that 10 years ago people
had disassemblers that are far better than what he's developing. Then, if
history
is any indication, you'll start hearing about how those other products are
"true disassemblers" (largely because they have "too many features", which
is his argument against "not true assemblers" that he uses today).
I wish him success with his project. But based on the type of code he's
produced for his assembler, I'm not expecting any ground-breaking results
here. I'm expecting another half-finished, buggy, product like the rest of
his RosAsm project.
Too bad.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde
Betov
news:cNnQb.24531$1e.2...@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net:
> [...]
>
> That's his goal.
> While admirable, it is also mathematically impossible to achieve in
> practice.
> It'll probably wind up working with about 80% of the object files out
> there without too many mistakes.
I suppose that, when RosAsm Disassembler will be declared
"completed", you will only talk about the PEs it will fail
to Disassemble and Reassemble in two Clicks. Mind you, most
people will much probably rather talk of PEs it will be
effective on, as, actually, no Tool is able to do this at
some comparable point (already true, actually).
> His goal is quite simple - reverse engineering (i.e., yo, ho, ho).
> RosAsm doesn't support libraries or separate compilation. So he
> got this bright idea that by providing a disassembler, people could
> disassemble other library code and cut and paste the source code
> into their programs. A rather poor way to implement library
> functionality, if you ask me. But as the tool is useful for other
> things, more power to him. I still think that he would be better off
> taking the effort and adding true linkage support to his assembler :-)
>"if you ask me"
No Master Pdf, nobody asks you. Nevertheless, for others:
My goals, with the Two-Clicks-Disassembler-Reassembler
are:
1) To turn RosAsm the Language with the bigger Set of
available Demos. This goal is _actually_ achieved.
(Gerhard, i am _not_ talking of the 'Demos-Scene". :)
2) To enable the programmers switching from any other
Tool/Language, to a quick and easy way for recovering
all of their previous works, in RosAsm syntax, without
loss of efforts.
3) To provide, as all Assemblers do, a precious learning
way.
4) To help retoring Assembly to the reference programming
language it has potentialy always been.
> This is funny! You should have seen the posts he made earlier
> (on the MASMForum board, IIRC) about how dry and boring
> and worthless all those papers on decompilation were. He found
> them unenlightening (IOW, they were probably above his head
> so he decided he didn't need to figure out what was being said).
>
> Rene is a loner. Despite a wealth of information out there (on
> many subjects he's involved in, not just disassemblers), he figures
> he knows all there is to know about everything and what he doesn't
> know, he can figure out on his own. Sadly, he wastes a lot of time
> reinventing a lot of wheels. His whole attitude towards library code
> is a perfect example of his approach to research: "it's better to do
> everything from scratch..."
I just hope it is evident for most readers, that you,
Master Pdf, are not going to reinvent any wheel, at all...
Betov.
< http://betov.free.fr/RosAsm.html >
Roy Jones
wrote:
> ... reverse engineering (i.e., yo, ho, ho).
Prof. Hyde,
You're not implying that all reverse engineering is piracy, are you?
Legally I believe the term
piracy pertains only to robbing ships. :)
> people could disassemble other library code and cut and paste the source
> code
> into their programs.
If that is really what Rene is doing, it would be a clear case of
copyright infringement(piracy in the common usage). I assumed he was
talking more about refactoring the disassembled code into RosAsm code and
recompiling. Perhaps some kind of similar refactoring tool would be a nice
add-on or teaching tool for HLA. Maybe a thesis project. ;)
Randall Hyde
>
> You're not implying that all reverse engineering is piracy, are you?
> Legally I believe the term
> piracy pertains only to robbing ships. :)
>
> > people could disassemble other library code and cut and paste the source
> > code
> > into their programs.
>
> If that is really what Rene is doing, it would be a clear case of
> copyright infringement(piracy in the common usage). I assumed he was
> talking more about refactoring the disassembled code into RosAsm code and
> recompiling. Perhaps some kind of similar refactoring tool would be a nice
> add-on or teaching tool for HLA. Maybe a thesis project. ;)
Rene has specifically stated that the purpose of the disassembler is to lift
code out of other programs for use with RosAsm applications. Sometimes
that's okay (assuming the author of such code explicitly gives permission
to do so). OTOH, Rene has made it fairly clear that he doesn't have a
whole lot of respect for copyright laws when they apply to commercial
apps (though the copyright attached to the GPL seems to be okay).
While I can feel for Rene - RosAsm's design precludes the use of
any object code compiled by any other language translator, the truth
is, if the disassembler gets used the way Rene claims that it will, piracy
will wind up being involved.
As for thesis project, you generally have to push the state of the art
to qualify as a thesis project. Rene steadfastly refuses to review
prior art, so it's quite unlikely he's going to produce anything that
wasn't already done 20 years ago in this field. Hardly thesis material.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde
Betov
news:opr2asko...@news.la.sbcglobal.net:
> On Sat, 24 Jan 2004 05:55:20 GMT, Randall Hyde
> <rand...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>> ... reverse engineering (i.e., yo, ho, ho).
>
> Prof. Hyde,
>
> You're not implying that all reverse engineering is piracy, are you?
> Legally I believe the term
> piracy pertains only to robbing ships. :)
_Yes_, of course, this is what he _means_. Surprised ?
There is no limit to what this fucky one is able to do,
you know...
>> people could disassemble other library code and cut and paste the
>> source code
>> into their programs.
>
> If that is really what Rene is doing, it would be a clear case of
> copyright infringement(piracy in the common usage). I assumed he was
> talking more about refactoring the disassembled code into RosAsm code
> and recompiling. Perhaps some kind of similar refactoring tool would
> be a nice add-on or teaching tool for HLA. Maybe a thesis project. ;)
"some kind of similar refactoring tool"... requires some
competency level, Roy. As you may know, since the beginning
of this part of the RosAsm Project, the "Great Expert of
Asm" is claiming every now and then that this is impossible
to do and that i am spoiling my time for nope. Now that it
begins to come evident that it (will) work... let us talk
of piracy...
It does not matter if it is actually effective on most small
PEs, for the swindler, and it will yet no matter when it will
work on most middle size Apps. What will matter, for the swindler,
is, and will always be, that it may fail (or will fail) in such
and such case... And, my you, if it was able to disassemble and
reassemble Internet Exporer identical, and working identical...
in two Clicks, this would not be the demonstration that it works
... this would be the demonstration that RosAsm is... a Piracy
Tool... and that legal sues are to be considered... :))
Perfectely knowing that he _would_ do this, since the beginning
of this project, i say to the RosAsm Volunteers to take a serious
care of _not_ saying, ever never, on RosAsm Board, on whatever
comercial App we could ever make a simple "try and see" test
for devs... ;) and that, in any case of such a terrible mistake,
i would immidiately do something i never do: Deleting the Post. ;)
Betov.
Beyond2000!
Randy wrote:
"That's his goal.
While admirable, it is also mathematically impossible to achieve in
practice.
It'll probably wind up working with about 80% of the object files out
there
without too many mistakes."
Well...Indeed in one point you are write, It is admirable !
But it is not impossible to achieve in practice. The rate we are
achieving is something around 90% in small files, and something around
70% in bigger files.
It still has some problems, that's true...but we are testing and
searching for all kinda erros to be fixed, and also trying to create
new techniques to improve this rate.
Sure...in big file it will be very hard to achieve of a level higher
then 95%, but it's not impossible at all.
And even when we reach that level, it will be totally increadible.
René is totally right, when the disassembler will be fully finished
you will try to decrease the power and reliability of it with other
issues...just for fun...well..it's increadible how you don't recognize
the use and power of at leats this inner tool.
A teacher like you say you are, should be more sensitive when talking
about this project, insetad being so proud of your self and
completelly trying to ruin his work. This is the same actitude you do
with your students ? I mean, when someone finds a better way then you
do, you decrease his work ?
You may not like René, but tell this annoyances about this
work....Man...you just don't get it do you ?
Randy wrote:
"His goal is quite simple - reverse engineering (i.e., yo, ho, ho)."
"His loss. One day he's going to wake up and realize that 10 years ago
people
had disassemblers that are far better than what he's developing. Then,
if
history
is any indication, you'll start hearing about how those other products
are
"true disassemblers" (largely because they have "too many features",
which
is his argument against "not true assemblers" that he uses today)."
Ok Randy, now you crossed the limit :( :( :( :(
1st of all....don't even try to bring this kinda attention to RosAsm.
The so called "reverse engennering" you are talking about is not
exactly an acurated term to use.
As long as you are implicit talking in piracy, let's go a little
further in the subject.
As Roy Jones, said....legal subjects are something that we have
absolutelly interests in preserv. RosAsm not only uses a GPL lincense,
but we may need to improve our own, based on the GPL etchics to the
usage of the disassembler.
Implying that RosAsm is a piracy tool is the same as say that IdaPro
is a piracy tool...And we all know that it isn't. AT the actual stage,
Ida can be used to recompile small projects under Tasm (and even,
under masm). And it does not make it a pirate tool at all.
Neither for Rosasm.
As you know, whenever you "disassemble" you wil never recover his
original source code back. The term is inacurate and general rules are
kinda dangerous thing. You are maybe talking about decompiling to
recover the source back, which is also an impossibility. (even with
Dodi's tools)
When you compile an app, whatever compiler you may use, you lost the
original source...Legacy is the limit here....If the tool could
somehow recover the original source code...Ok..i agree with you this
will be a break in the authoral rights.
But when you disassmeble a compiled app you will never get the source
back, and you have a new source, but, insetad it is in the language of
the compiler (.c, .cpp etc), it will be in .asm.
Since this is not the original source, and it is not even similar like
the original one, the legal aspects may change.
The problem is with the usage. When you disassemble an app, on
rebuilding it like the original one, you will have problems if you
use, for example the same visual look, or the same technique, the same
name etc....
I don't kinow how to explain all of this in english, but....
For example...if you rebuild a drink based on the analysis of it's
chemical components...will you breaking the copyright rules ?
Well....it depends on many things....
1 - The tecnhique you used to build this drink...Was exactly the same
as the other?
2 - The name you use for your drink..is it the same ?
3 - The appearance, taste, smell, consistance ...are they the same ?
If all this questions are negative...then...you can be sure...No legal
problems...
Otherwise....Pepsi Cola would already being taken off the market in
the 1st place.
But...if you build a Poca-Cola....with the exact technique, chem
components, etc etc etc....not that they were based on the other after
an analysis, but when they were stolen, for example...Then...This is
illegal.
The same for the disassemblers and decompilers.
As Roy Jones said....I believe that the term "refactoring" is the most
acurated to RosAsm disassembler future.
RosAsm, in future will be a trully translator/refactoring tool with
the disassembler technique.
And there is absolutelly no legal problems with that...I could point
to you more legal reasons or foundaments...but it will be useless
because your bad actitudes.
Now it's completelly prooved that you have absolutelly no respect for
others people's works when they are much better then yours.
Don't even try to blame René again...that he started and bla bla bla
bla.....because nobody here and at masmboard or rosasm board are
stupid enough to buy that arguments.
You always talks about bad manners...well you don't seem to be so good
at your manner afterall this time. At least René speaks honestly, and
say what he have to say...no matter if he curse, say bad words etc
etc....If you tease a lion, the least that you should expect is a
bite.
I consider myself as a great lawyer, Randy, maybe not rich yet,
because i'm try to keep the most honest and honored as i can...but
when i see someone smarter or with a better knowledge then i have, i'm
humble enough to recognize those facts...Even if i don't like him or
don't like his work etc.
This is the sense of what is fare and what is not fare. And as a
teacher you should be the 1st to understand that, specially that you
should give to your students other examples then programming..but
ethics, behaviour...etc etc...
You may have a power of convincing other peoples randy, like your
students etc....(the same as you did with Hutch, btw...)....but at
least teach them good things, good aspects of programming or even in
life. This is not the example that a teacher should do...Not a good
teacher perhaps.
I don't like to call names, but this time, MasterPDF you desearves it.
:)
Best Regards,
Guga
Randall Hyde
"Beyond2000!" <mauro...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:99c1ddcc.04012...@posting.google.com...
> Hi Guys,
>
>
> Randy wrote:
>
> "That's his goal.
> While admirable, it is also mathematically impossible to achieve in
> practice.
> It'll probably wind up working with about 80% of the object files out
> there
> without too many mistakes."
>
> Well...Indeed in one point you are write, It is admirable !
>
> But it is not impossible to achieve in practice. The rate we are
> achieving is something around 90% in small files, and something around
> 70% in bigger files.
On which files?
Obviously, you can stack the deck by processing carefully chosen files
with the disassembler. IDAPro does a great job on stuff that is
"run-of-the-mill". The real test occurs when you have to start
handling data interspersed with code, addresses in the data area
interspersed with data that looks like addresses, and stuff like
that.
IOW, you've done the easy part. The hard part (that no one has
been able to crack yet) still lies before you.
>
> It still has some problems, that's true...but we are testing and
> searching for all kinda erros to be fixed, and also trying to create
> new techniques to improve this rate.
This is why having a little education is useful. It's nice to know when
something is impossible. No doubt, you can improve things quite a
bit. Someday, you might even get as good as IDAPro is in "automatic
mode." But without an interactive mode to allow a real live human
being to make code/data choices, it will never be perfect. In order to
achieve that, you would have to prove the "halting theorem" incorrect.
>
> Sure...in big file it will be very hard to achieve of a level higher
> then 95%, but it's not impossible at all.
Size has little to do with it. It's simply the type of data and code
that appears in the file. As I've said before, when you think you've
got it working perfectly, I'm sure I'll be able to break it in five
minutes.
> And even when we reach that level, it will be totally increadible.
Yes, it will.
OTOH, there are already some totally incredible disassemblers
available today. And part of what makes them incredible is the fact
that they allow an interactive mode. Rene's insistence on the automatic
mode is going to doom the project. It will be great for those files
it can handle properly. It will be useless for just about everything else.
> René is totally right, when the disassembler will be fully finished
> you will try to decrease the power and reliability of it with other
> issues...just for fun...well..it's increadible how you don't recognize
> the use and power of at leats this inner tool.
Here's the problem: *I* wrote a disassembler for the Apple II about
20 years ago. So I'm somewhat familiar with the problems you're going
to run into. I fully appreciate what a *good* disassembler like IDAPro
can do. I also know that Rene is headed down the wrong path. The
moment he adds interactive capability, I'll start believing in the project.
Until then, it's just another example of Rene's inability to test the
software
he writes -- he runs all these test cases that *work* and assumes that
it works for everything, ignoring reality.
Again, I repeat - his approach will probably handle about 80% of
the code out there just fine (especially code that was written in
a naive fashion). It will choke on code that uses sophisticated
optimization or hand-tuned trickery. Unfortunately, without
an interactive mode, if there's one byte in the file that gets disassembled
improperly, that may pollute the rest of the work and the result
will be untrustworthy.
>
> A teacher like you say you are, should be more sensitive when talking
> about this project, insetad being so proud of your self and
> completelly trying to ruin his work. This is the same actitude you do
> with your students ? I mean, when someone finds a better way then you
> do, you decrease his work ?
Ruin?
I'm trying to save it.
I've pointed out over and over again that if he wants to succeed, he
has to add an interactive mode. The problem is, Rene is very bull-headed
and refuses to acknowledge the fact that *maybe* someone knows more
than him about this subject. His attitude concerning the decompilation
papers is a perfect example. It's not like this stuff hasn't been done
before.
He's just too lazy to spend the time doing the research to figure out what
mistakes people have made in the past and what successes they've had
so he can emulate the successes and avoid the mistakes. As such, he's
doomed to repeat those same mistakes. Forgive my lack of respect for
his research methods. It will be fun for all of you; it will be a learning
experience. Hopefully, when it's all done, some of you will say "Hey!
Those guys that published those articles actually knew what they were
talking about and we should have paid them more attention." Then,
you will have learned an even more important lesson about life in
addition to everything you're learning about disassembly (which,
unfortunately, is going to be learned the hard way).
> You may not like René, but tell this annoyances about this
> work....Man...you just don't get it do you ?
I'm afraid Rene is the one that doesn't get it.
It's a real shame he refuses to do a little reading on the subjects
he's programming for. He complains about not having enough
time as he is programming 12 hours a day (hard to believe, but
okay), the bottom line is that if he spent a little more time with
up-front research and design, he'd be *sooooo* much more
productive. But we've all seen his posts on software engineering
issues, so I won't even go there.
>
> Ok Randy, now you crossed the limit :( :( :( :(
>
> 1st of all....don't even try to bring this kinda attention to RosAsm.
>
> The so called "reverse engennering" you are talking about is not
> exactly an acurated term to use.
>
> As long as you are implicit talking in piracy, let's go a little
> further in the subject.
>
> As Roy Jones, said....legal subjects are something that we have
> absolutelly interests in preserv. RosAsm not only uses a GPL lincense,
> but we may need to improve our own, based on the GPL etchics to the
> usage of the disassembler.
So everyone who uses the disassembler is going to use it to disassemble
GPL code (for which the source already exists) or code that they own,
right? That's not the impression I got reading Rene's posts. Sorry.
> Implying that RosAsm is a piracy tool is the same as say that IdaPro
> is a piracy tool...And we all know that it isn't. AT the actual stage,
> Ida can be used to recompile small projects under Tasm (and even,
> under masm). And it does not make it a pirate tool at all.
>
> Neither for Rosasm.
No, it doesn't make it a piracy tool.
But Rene's suggestions about how he was going to use it certainly
raises those concerns.
> As you know, whenever you "disassemble" you wil never recover his
> original source code back. The term is inacurate and general rules are
> kinda dangerous thing. You are maybe talking about decompiling to
> recover the source back, which is also an impossibility. (even with
> Dodi's tools)
So, you're saying that if you disassemble some C code into RosAsm
assembly, it's perfectly okay and moral to use that code even if the
original code was copyrighted? Is this the message I'm getting?
>
> When you compile an app, whatever compiler you may use, you lost the
> original source...Legacy is the limit here....If the tool could
> somehow recover the original source code...Ok..i agree with you this
> will be a break in the authoral rights.
>
> But when you disassmeble a compiled app you will never get the source
> back, and you have a new source, but, insetad it is in the language of
> the compiler (.c, .cpp etc), it will be in .asm.
That doesn't make this reverse engineering legal.
The copyright law covers "translations".
You may no more disassemble a program and legally copy the result
than you could translate "Art of Assembly" into French and sell it
yourself because it is not the same as the original.
>
>
> Since this is not the original source, and it is not even similar like
> the original one, the legal aspects may change.
No, they don't. As I said, copyright law deals with translations.
And your misunderstanding of the copyright law matches *exactly*
what I believed Rene was saying in earlier posts about the
RosAsm disassembler, and this is exactly why I made the piracy
comment in the first place.
>
> The problem is with the usage. When you disassemble an app, on
> rebuilding it like the original one, you will have problems if you
> use, for example the same visual look, or the same technique, the same
> name etc....
>
> I don't kinow how to explain all of this in english, but....
>
> For example...if you rebuild a drink based on the analysis of it's
> chemical components...will you breaking the copyright rules ?
You don't copyright a drink.
You can copyright the recipe for it; you can *patent* the formulation,
but you can't copyright it.
>
> Well....it depends on many things....
>
> 1 - The tecnhique you used to build this drink...Was exactly the same
> as the other?
>
> 2 - The name you use for your drink..is it the same ?
>
> 3 - The appearance, taste, smell, consistance ...are they the same ?
>
> If all this questions are negative...then...you can be sure...No legal
> problems...
I guess you missed out on the big "look and feel" copyright arguments
of the early 1980's, eh?
> Otherwise....Pepsi Cola would already being taken off the market in
> the 1st place.
>
>
> But...if you build a Poca-Cola....with the exact technique, chem
> components, etc etc etc....not that they were based on the other after
> an analysis, but when they were stolen, for example...Then...This is
> illegal.
No. Completely different concept, legally.
And, btw, C&C cola was a complete rip-off of Coke many years
ago. Perfectly legal.
But if you start reverse engineering code from copyrighted applications,
and you think that's legal, you're in for a big surprise (hint: whatever you
do, don't reverse any software written by the RIAA :-)).
>
> The same for the disassemblers and decompilers.
No, it's not the same.
> As Roy Jones said....I believe that the term "refactoring" is the most
> acurated to RosAsm disassembler future.
>
> RosAsm, in future will be a trully translator/refactoring tool with
> the disassembler technique.
Renaming the process doesn't change it in the eyes of the law.
>
>
> And there is absolutelly no legal problems with that...I could point
> to you more legal reasons or foundaments...but it will be useless
> because your bad actitudes.
I think you better consult a lawyer.
Don't take my word for it. But you better not take Rene's either.
>
>
> Now it's completelly prooved that you have absolutelly no respect for
> others people's works when they are much better then yours.
Hahahaha!
Okay, whatever.
>
> Don't even try to blame René again...that he started and bla bla bla
> bla.....because nobody here and at masmboard or rosasm board are
> stupid enough to buy that arguments.
Hopefully, they are not stupid enough to buy your legal argument.
That could land them in a world of trouble.
>
> You always talks about bad manners...well you don't seem to be so good
> at your manner afterall this time. At least René speaks honestly, and
> say what he have to say...no matter if he curse, say bad words etc
> etc....If you tease a lion, the least that you should expect is a
> bite.
Yes, Rene speaks so honestly.
That much is *soooo* clear.
> I consider myself as a great lawyer, Randy, maybe not rich yet,
> because i'm try to keep the most honest and honored as i can...but
> when i see someone smarter or with a better knowledge then i have, i'm
> humble enough to recognize those facts...Even if i don't like him or
> don't like his work etc.
I don't know what country you're practicing law in, maybe Hong Kong?
But if you really are speaking honestly and you really are a lawyer,
you better go back for a refresher at law school. Revisit the copyright
law and pay particular close attention to "translations".
> This is the sense of what is fare and what is not fare. And as a
> teacher you should be the 1st to understand that, specially that you
> should give to your students other examples then programming..but
> ethics, behaviour...etc etc...
It is fair to rip off code from someone else's copyrighted work?
You may not agree with the ethics of the copyright law (and I, personally,
do not). But if you intend to be a law-abiding citizen, you have to live
with and respect that law.
You may not feel that its ethical for someone to withhold information
(such as a computer-based algorithm) from other people who could
use it, but until the laws change on this planet, they have every right
to do that and it is illegal (and inethical in most people's minds) to
copy their work. Why should you benefit from the effort they've put
in without putting in comparable effort yourself?
In fact, I find this whole argument ludicrous. On the one hand,
Rene refuses to study the information that is freely available
concerning disassemblers, but he's writing the disassembler
in order to reverse engineer that information which is not
freely available. Am I the only one that sees the paradox here?
> You may have a power of convincing other peoples randy, like your
> students etc....(the same as you did with Hutch, btw...)....but at
> least teach them good things, good aspects of programming or even in
> life. This is not the example that a teacher should do...Not a good
> teacher perhaps.
Yes, I would teach my students ethical behavior. And doing what
*you're* suggesting here (forget what Rene thinks or does) is not
ethical behavior.
I also taught my students to *study* the subject and avoid
re-inventing the wheel whenever possible.
There are a couple of lessons that the RosAsm team needs to
learn, quite frankly.
>
>
> I don't like to call names, but this time, MasterPDF you desearves it.
> :)
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Guga
I'm sorry you feel slighted by my comments about the RosAsm disassembler.
But I do feel sorry for all of you working on the project because it's
clearly
a case of the "blind leading the blind."
Call me all the names you want. Like that's going to bother me after what
I've put up with from Rene over the past four years (and many people
before that).
In the end, however, I feel sorry that you're going to have to learn
these lessons the hard way. It's too bad that *you're* not willing to take
a lesson from a teacher and you're following the path set down by
someone who *clearly* isn't a teacher.
Donkey
You may be a lawyer but I have also dealt with these issues before, the
concept of the chinese wall is not foreign to the business that I am in. You
should look at the case law for Chinese Walls and also derivitive works.
Anything that you disassemble with RoAsm and examine can be subject to the
copyright of the original work. In the same way that Phoenix BIOS was
developped behind a chinese wall in order not to violate copyright of IBM
you must do the same. If you examine the code that is used by the originator
of the software then clone it you are in violation of the authors copyright,
it makes no difference if you change languages or syntax or any other damn
thing, it is a derivitive work. You may consider yourself a competant
lawyer, and I do not dispute that, but do not give patently untrue legal
advice and say that you are a lawyer in the same post, it is unethical.Your
claim that by not recovering the original source code you are not violating
the copyright law is ludicrous, I have dealt with disposal of intellectual
property and believe me the law is alot more intelligently written than
that. However, if you do not examine the source code or attempt in any way
to reverse engineer it, then you may write an application that performs the
exact same task, but you better hope that they don't find out that you use
RoAsm because that is a tool designed to violate the chinese wall and no
judge will ever believe that you did not RE the original package.
And I think you have the situation reversed regarding Randall and the coward
(I will no longer use his name since his last email to me). The coward is
seen as a joke and a minor amusement to most and his assembler is an even
bigger joke. Those who use RoAsm are perhaps mistakenly seen as hackers and
pirates because that is what the assembler aspires to do well but I have no
sympathy for them, they chose to associate themselves with the coward.
Randall's opinion is generally respected though not taken as the final word
by any means, the coward's opinion is always rejected before it is even
read.
Donkey
"Beyond2000!" <mauro...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:99c1ddcc.04012...@posting.google.com...
Beyond2000!
For the rate i said....The files are being tested randomnly, nobody is
choosing a file to test just to tease you or something with high
rates. The data inside code, data that looks like adrress...those
kinda problems is exactly what René is trying to fix, and he did fix
in some cases.
About the size of the file....Of course that size don't have much
relashionship with the final result, but the tests we are doing is in
all aspects, speed, memory leaks, reliability of the resultant code,
identificatino of nested data etc etc...
"So everyone who uses the disassembler is going to use it to
disassemble
GPL code (for which the source already exists) or code that they own,
right? That's not the impression I got reading Rene's posts. Sorry."
This is the logical and more safer actitude to the user. If the user
disassemble an copyrighted app, he should at least be aware of the
risks of his action. This is the modification of the license i was
talking about.
Ok..a few things....
1 - Yeah...i am a lawyer. And no, i did not graduated at hong
kong...And you don't understood what i tried to explain.
2 - I wouldn't intend to start a war with you. There were no reason
for you being stupid (i mean rude --- dunno the term in english)
3 - What i wrote was not a atach at you, in anyway...If you are in
defensive, just consider that english is not may native language and
it is very dificult for me try to explain legal doutrines (and acts)
to common people, and it is even more dificult to do that in english.
The copyright law is not that simple Randy....Law is not like math. It
always depends on interpretation and facts.
I was not saying in anyway that people are allowed to do whatever they
want with any disassembler.
"It is fair to rip off code from someone else's copyrighted work?"
"Renaming the process doesn't change it in the eyes of the law."
Of course not...but you didn't understood....No disassembler can
actually rip off the code (the original code, i mean). It is not as
simple as you say as only "renaming the process".
Look, nobody here is a defender of illegal actions.
In authoral rights (copyright and patents, in general), there are some
aspects you need to consider. 1st the softwares that are fully
protected by copyright law, i mean, whose licenses prevents the use of
the application other then the one specified by the license. 2nd the
ones that were available for the public (public domain). 3rd the ones
that the user actually owns the license to do whatever he wants,
except sell, rent or distribute the app. 4th - the use of the app to
be studied (Fully or parts of it -- depends of the license). 5th. The
focused people that the app was made to. (I mean...if the app was
build to be used only to and for military people, or university, or
medical staff, etc etc)
When someone builds a license to be used in their apps (or books or
whatever...), he must take into account that is not only because he
registered (I don't know the term in english for that) his app, that
he is fully protected by the copyrigth law. His license must contains
all aspects that he wants to preserve. In general terms, a license is
nothing but a contract. This "contract"
is valid under a preexistent law. The license should be accordying to
the law that he is focused, but, if the "contract" contains some
topics that allows the user to distribute or copy the product, if the
user copy it..it will be perfectly legal. (Of course, that if this
copy doen's harm the rights of others, that were prevented by the
law.)
Randy, it's really a hard thing to explain in english...It is not a
simple as it seems to be.
You are thinking in commercial terms of the subject and this is where
you are not understanding in what i'm trying to say (This and my
inability explain technical law terms in english).
When i gave to you the example of Coca-Cola, i was saying in general
terms...I was not thinking in terms of diferences between patrents and
copyrights etc. I only said that way, because i thought it would be
better for you to understand.
Nobody said in reverse engineer copyrighted apps. I was trying to tell
you that sometimes, what you think that is protected by copyrigth, it
may not be.
"The copyright law covers "translations".
You may no more disassemble a program and legally copy the result
than you could translate "Art of Assembly" into French and sell it
yourself because it is not the same as the original."
This is exactly what i was trying to say. In your case (AOAsm), as
long as you own the license (and i assume you do), nobody can
translate (directly and literally) to any language without your
express permission. This is also valid for websites distributions,
annoucements etc etc.
Here is when i say that you are only thinking in commercial terms and
you are making a small mistake.
If someone buys your book, reads it, learn from it, and...let's
say..in 02 months he decide to write his own book based on what he
learned and read...he is totally able to, as long as he:
1 - Don't wrote his book as an exact or very similar copy of yours;
2 - On any equal of similar terms, he make a note to the origins (a
bibliography notation, i mean)
3 - He didn't use, sell, rent your terms as if they were made by him.
4 - He didn't wrote the title as the same as yours that could cause
confusion to the consumer.
5 - He wrote the book based on his own arguments, conclusions
etc...developing a new idea, even if he is talking about your subject.
(Not as he made your subject as his, of course)
For softwares, is not exactly the same thing as the books....but the
rules are similar.
In a much, much simpler way...what makes it legal are 02 things: a)
The attention to the law where the software was builded (or patented
or copyrighted); b) The respect of the usage of the license of the app
I won't make further comments about your offenses about me, Randy.
Only thought that you were able to understand what i was trying to
say, in a friendly way...but...you are so disturbed and involved with
these flame wars...that again i have to say...You don't get it !
"Call me all the names you want. Like that's going to bother me after
what
I've put up with from Rene over the past four years (and many people
before that)."
You are being too emotive here....I thought you knew that it was a
inofensive teasement. But perhaps, since René is not the only one who
you are puting up with, and at least 04 years ago you had problems
with other people...well, this may explain your acts.
"In the end, however, I feel sorry that you're going to have to learn
these lessons the hard way. It's too bad that *you're* not willing to
take
a lesson from a teacher and you're following the path set down by
someone who *clearly* isn't a teacher."
What lesson ? Really, i didn't understood...what kinda lesson ?
Sorry Randy if all of this upset you, i was not trying to push my
point of view or something...only trying to explain a couple of
things.
Best regards,
Guga
Gerhard W. Gruber
alt.lang.asm with <opr2asko...@news.la.sbcglobal.net>
>If that is really what Rene is doing, it would be a clear case of
>copyright infringement(piracy in the common usage). I assumed he was
Thats nonsense. I can disassemble and copy & paste to my hearts content and
this is no copyright infringment as long as I use my own code for it. Of
course, there is also the difference with local law. Here I can do reverse
engineering for some reasons without the need to fear the law. Of course in
the glorious US where they have laws specifically made to make the rich
richer, the case is quite different. As long as you have enough money, you can
make your custom laws there, which define whatever you wish.
>talking more about refactoring the disassembled code into RosAsm code and
>recompiling. Perhaps some kind of similar refactoring tool would be a nice
>add-on or teaching tool for HLA. Maybe a thesis project. ;)
IDA Pro. :)
--
Gerhard Gruber
Maintainer of
SoftICE for Linux - http://pice.sourceforge.net/
Fast application launcher - http://sourceforge.net/projects/launchmenu
Gerhard W. Gruber
<rand...@earthlink.net> in alt.lang.asm with
<TfBQb.25146$1e....@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net>
>Rene has specifically stated that the purpose of the disassembler is to lift
>code out of other programs for use with RosAsm applications. Sometimes
Yes, he did that. But it doesn't follow that he meant to steal code from
programs where it is not allowed. I never read such a claim from him, also nit
implicitly. I always understood that the disassembler is a tool for reusing
your existing code or library code, which you would reuse anyway.
I don't think that this is a good idea, but then again. That approach would be
VERY hard to apply to some commercial app anyway, as it takes quite a lot of
time to "reuse" a nice function from i.E. MS Word. I doubt that anybody, who
is in his right mind, will reverse engineer Word jsut to get a function out of
it. The amount of work involved is in no relation to the benefit you gain, so
this already makes the disassembling approach only usefull, as a tool for
reusing code, for apps where you already know the code quite well, which
limits it to your own code mostly.
>is, if the disassembler gets used the way Rene claims that it will, piracy
>will wind up being involved.
I strongly doubt this. IDA Pro is quite good for reverse engineering and I
doubt that Renes disassembler will ever become so good, as this is also a
question of time and resources. Pressing two buttons and having a resuable
code will only be possible for a SEVERLY limited number of apps.
Considering the time and resources the IDA Pro guys already spent on it, I
don't really think that Rene will come up with anything just as usefull or
even surpassing it.
hutch--
software that he wrote his own assembler with, generally the rest of
the world is not fooled by Betov's reinterpretations of property laws
in relation to software. The only legal way to get code for a project
is to write it yourself or have legal right to code written by other
people.
Disassembling code from applications that are owned by other people is
plain theft and this is what Betov has stated with his intention of
producing a disassembler. It may well fit in with someone who believes
that all code should be free and subject to a GPL licence but stealing
commercial code is not an exercise in GPL licenced code, it is plain
theft and needs to be seen that way.
A disassembler is in fact a useful tool for the author of the code as
it helps them to see what code is being generated by their compiler or
assembler but there is a difference between developmental use of a
disassembler and illegal use of a disassembler to steal other people's
intellectual property and Betov is yet to realise this.
Regards,
hutch at movsd dot com
The Half A Wannabee
"Randall Hyde" <rand...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:HKFQb.25404$1e.2...@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net...
>
> "Beyond2000!" <mauro...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:99c1ddcc.04012...@posting.google.com...
> > Hi Guys,
> >
> >
> > Randy wrote:
(*So everyone who uses the disassembler is going to use it to disassemble
GPL code (for which the source already exists) or code that they own,
right? That's not the impression I got reading Rene's posts. Sorry.
*)
(*
So, you're saying that if you disassemble some C code into RosAsm
assembly, it's perfectly okay and moral to use that code even if the
original code was copyrighted? Is this the message I'm getting?
*)
It could be used to refactor parts of a users previous work Randall.
The Half A Wannabee
"The Half A Wannabee" <ShakainZulu_AT(BreakMachine)_Hotmail.com> wrote in
message news:4013ab50$1...@news.broadpark.no...
>
> "Randall Hyde" <rand...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
> news:HKFQb.25404$1e.2...@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net...
> >
> > "Beyond2000!" <mauro...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> > news:99c1ddcc.04012...@posting.google.com...
> > > Hi Guys,
> > >
> It could be used to refactor parts of a users previous work Randall.
However, if even *this* is breaking of patent laws, to study e.g OOP, and
learn from it what not to do, and then call that a derivative work, and then
beeing related to patent laws....hmm...if this would be true, then there is
no possibility to create anything new. Someone might say that it builds on
the knowlegde from the past, e.g, that it is derivative work of early DOS
patents. Hey it uses Intel memonics...it builds on someone elses work !
Gerhard W. Gruber
with <af910ce4.04012...@posting.google.com>
>that all code should be free and subject to a GPL licence but stealing
>commercial code is not an exercise in GPL licenced code, it is plain
>theft and needs to be seen that way.
Where does he promote that? I only read posts where he said that his preffered
way is to disassemble and put the code in your source. But that doesn't
autmatically mean that it has to be stolen. As I explained earlier, I think
the way Rene sees that, is more tho reuse your own code because he can't fit
in some library support. I don't think that it is a approach, which would be
embraced by many users, to actually disassemble commercial apps just to get
some function. If sombody does that, you can't prevent it anyway, but this is
not the usual way to go about.
Betov
news:odh710lmmcfdig632...@4ax.com:
> On 25 Jan 2004 02:28:05 -0800 wrote hu...@movsd.com (hutch--) in
> alt.lang.asm with <af910ce4.04012...@posting.google.com>
>
>>that all code should be free and subject to a GPL licence but stealing
>>commercial code is not an exercise in GPL licenced code, it is plain
>>theft and needs to be seen that way.
>
> Where does he promote that? I only read posts where he said that his
> preffered way is to disassemble and put the code in your source. But
> that doesn't autmatically mean that it has to be stolen. As I
> explained earlier, I think the way Rene sees that, is more tho reuse
> your own code because he can't fit in some library support. I don't
> think that it is a approach, which would be embraced by many users, to
> actually disassemble commercial apps just to get some function. If
> sombody does that, you can't prevent it anyway, but this is not the
> usual way to go about.
>
No need to answer to Propaganda, Gerhard. Wasting efforts,
IMHO.
Hutch is the kind of guy who actively promotes, for example,
that GPL is inheritable, you know... That the MicroSoft EULA
"frees" the MASM user from having to submit to the oppression
of GPL, that MASM is the best Assembler on earth, that i wrote
the very first version of RosAsm with a stolen Tool, and so on,
and so on...
What do you mean to discuss with a guy who introduces himself
as the "Author of MASM32" ?! :))
Betov.
Randall Hyde
"Gerhard W. Gruber" <spar...@gmx.at> wrote in message
news:ai57109oanq2hj09g...@4ax.com...
> On Sat, 24 Jan 2004 21:15:31 GMT wrote "Randall Hyde"
> <rand...@earthlink.net> in alt.lang.asm with
> <TfBQb.25146$1e....@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net>
>
> >Rene has specifically stated that the purpose of the disassembler is to
lift
> >code out of other programs for use with RosAsm applications. Sometimes
>
> Yes, he did that. But it doesn't follow that he meant to steal code from
> programs where it is not allowed. I never read such a claim from him, also
nit
> implicitly. I always understood that the disassembler is a tool for
reusing
> your existing code or library code, which you would reuse anyway.
Then again, I've been reading Rene's posts for quite some time. So
I've got the benefit of history in order to infer his meanings here.
No, he did not *explicitly* say "we're going to use this to steal
copyrighted code." OTOH, he did say that he was going to use
the program to extract useful subroutines from C programs. Given
his past disdane for commercial apps and lack of respect for
their copyrights, I just don't see him being too concerned about
the copy rights of others.
>
> I don't think that this is a good idea, but then again. That approach
would be
> VERY hard to apply to some commercial app anyway, as it takes quite a lot
of
> time to "reuse" a nice function from i.E. MS Word. I doubt that anybody,
who
> is in his right mind, will reverse engineer Word jsut to get a function
out of
> it. The amount of work involved is in no relation to the benefit you gain,
so
> this already makes the disassembling approach only usefull, as a tool for
> reusing code, for apps where you already know the code quite well, which
> limits it to your own code mostly.
Of course. Then again, I don't remember him stating he was going to use
the code to rip off whole applications. It's a tool for building "libraries"
of code by disassembling functions in other programs and cutting and
pasting them into RosAsm sources. Certainly RosAsm users could use
this scheme for converting legally usable routines (e.g., glib) into RosAsm
as well as copyrighted code. No doubt, this would be the *primary* use
of such a disassembler when used in this fashion...
> >is, if the disassembler gets used the way Rene claims that it will,
piracy
> >will wind up being involved.
And notice I did not say "This is all it will get used for..." I said
"piracy
will wind up being involved."
>
> I strongly doubt this. IDA Pro is quite good for reverse engineering and I
> doubt that Renes disassembler will ever become so good, as this is also a
> question of time and resources. Pressing two buttons and having a resuable
> code will only be possible for a SEVERLY limited number of apps.
I agree 100%. Then again, Rene did *not* claim that they were going to
use it to reverse engineer whole applications. Without an interactive mode,
this would be virtually impossible anyway. However, lifting a copyrighted
subroutine out of an application is still a copyright violation.
And there is a difference between "reverse engineering" and using a tool
for lifting copyrighted code. For ("legal") reverse engineering, you use
a "clean-room" approach. One engineer disassembles the code and
studies the algorithms, and then writes a specification for what has to
be done and a second engineer, who has not seen a representation of
the source code (including disassembled code) then implements that
algorithm. The "two-click" approach is not "clean" reverse engineering
and I serious doubt it would stand up for more than two seconds in
any court of law that respects the Berne Convention.
>
> Considering the time and resources the IDA Pro guys already spent on it, I
> don't really think that Rene will come up with anything just as usefull or
> even surpassing it.
Especially considering that Rene steadfastly refuses to look at the product
and see the features that it supports. He stubbornly insists on making all
the mistakes and discoveries on his own. Too bad. With all the time he's
wasting reinventing the wheel over and over again, he could actually have
developed a good assembler system :-)
Cheers,
Randy Hyde
Randall Hyde
> On Sat, 24 Jan 2004 20:50:04 GMT wrote Roy Jones <mhc...@sbcglobal.net> in
> alt.lang.asm with <opr2asko...@news.la.sbcglobal.net>
>
> >If that is really what Rene is doing, it would be a clear case of
> >copyright infringement(piracy in the common usage). I assumed he was
>
> Thats nonsense. I can disassemble and copy & paste to my hearts content
and
> this is no copyright infringment as long as I use my own code for it. Of
> course, there is also the difference with local law. Here I can do reverse
> engineering for some reasons without the need to fear the law. Of course
in
> the glorious US where they have laws specifically made to make the rich
> richer, the case is quite different. As long as you have enough money, you
can
> make your custom laws there, which define whatever you wish.
Actually, Europe's copyright laws tend to be a bit more stringent than the
U.S.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde
Randall Hyde
"The Half A Wannabee" <ShakainZulu_AT(BreakMachine)_Hotmail.com> wrote in
message news:4013ab50$1...@news.broadpark.no...
>>
>
It very well *could* be used for that purpose. Indeed, I expect the
*majority* of the time it *will* be used for that purpose.
Go back and read my post. I did *not* say it would only be used
for piracy. I said I suspected that piracy is going to be involved.
Given Rene's attitudes and his comments, and his obvious lack of
knowledge about copyright laws, combined with his lack of ethics
concerning intellectual property, I have my suspicions that he won't
have a problem at all with people lifting code out of copyrighted programs
for inclusion in a RosAsm "cut & paste" library.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde
Randall Hyde
"The Half A Wannabee" <ShakainZulu_AT(BreakMachine)_Hotmail.com> wrote in
>
> > It could be used to refactor parts of a users previous work Randall.
>
> However, if even *this* is breaking of patent laws, to study e.g OOP, and
> learn from it what not to do, and then call that a derivative work, and
then
> beeing related to patent laws....hmm...if this would be true, then there
is
> no possibility to create anything new. Someone might say that it builds on
> the knowlegde from the past, e.g, that it is derivative work of early DOS
> patents. Hey it uses Intel memonics...it builds on someone elses work !
1. There's a big difference between studying the implementation of an
algorithm
and writing your own code to implement that algorithm, and "two-click
disassembly/reassembly." The first way, with appropriate clean-room
methods
has withstood legal challenge, the second way has not.
2. BTW, just so you know, Intel *did* copyright their mnemonics early on
(e.g., for the 8080 processor family) to prevent other CPU manufacturers
from copying their instruction set. This is why the Z80, for example,
uses
a completely different set of mnemonics than the 8080. They also did
this
for the 8086, but never really enforced it because early on other
manufacturers
licensed the instruction set rather than reverse engineered it.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde
Randall Hyde
>
>
> For the rate i said....The files are being tested randomnly, nobody is
> choosing a file to test just to tease you or something with high
> rates. The data inside code, data that looks like adrress...those
> kinda problems is exactly what René is trying to fix, and he did fix
> in some cases.
I don't suspect otherwise.
The problem, however, is the quality of the files you're using to
test the disassembler. For example, if you're disassembling
C files produced by a given C compiler (e.g., MSVC), it's
reasonable to expect that if you work well on a fair set of
such apps, you'll work well on most apps produced by that
compiler.
Allow me to give you one example you've probably not tested
with yet -- self extracting compressed executables.
How about programs with self-modifying code?
Again, I truly believe that the disassembler can do a bang-up
job on about 80% of the code out there. It's the other 20%
that's going to be problematic. Alas, that other 20% is also
some of the more interesting code to disassemble (as it tends
to be written a bit more efficiently and there's more to learn,
from an assembly point of view, from that code).
>
>
> About the size of the file....Of course that size don't have much
> relashionship with the final result, but the tests we are doing is in
> all aspects, speed, memory leaks, reliability of the resultant code,
> identificatino of nested data etc etc...
I don't know your test data, so I can't comment too much about
it's quality. But when Rene starts bragging about how well it
disassembles the RosAsm executable I think I'm going to choke :-)
Cheers,
Randy Hyde
Gerhard W. Gruber
<XnF947BAA065F...@213.228.0.136>
>No need to answer to Propaganda, Gerhard. Wasting efforts,
>IMHO.
:)
What I still like to know is, if my interpretation of the usage of your
diassembler is correct?
Gerhard W. Gruber
<rand...@earthlink.net> in alt.lang.asm with
<60SQb.25923$1e.1...@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net>
>Actually, Europe's copyright laws tend to be a bit more stringent than the
>U.S.
Currently I think not, but they are working on it. Funny thing is to see what
people start doing with the DMCA. I bet a resourcefull laywer can even boil a
cup of coffee with it. :)
Betov
> On 25 Jan 2004 15:21:35 GMT wrote Betov <be...@free.fr> in
> alt.lang.asm with <XnF947BAA065F...@213.228.0.136>
>
>>No need to answer to Propaganda, Gerhard. Wasting efforts,
>>IMHO.
>
> :)
>
> What I still like to know is, if my interpretation of the usage of
> your diassembler is correct?
>
Well, i have already answered to this: The purpose of
the "Two-Click-Disassembler-Reassembler" is to:
1) Do what all Assemblers do, even, if, of course, the high
level of integration of RosAsm makes this more powerfull
and more easy.
2) Make the Demos Translations a breath. As there seem to
be some problem about what i call "Demos", these are simply
all of these small demos you get with most programming
Language, about how to do this, how to do that, either
called "demos", "Examples", "Tuts",...
3) When a programmer means to switch from any other Language
to Asm, he may like to recover some of his previous works
in Assembly. Such a Tool is supposed to make this very
easy (and, by the way,... very pedagogic).
4) Inside the Open Sources Mouvement, translating, say, a
C App to Asm is not a so trivial task. It is, anyway, always
a _long_ task to do this by hand. In many cases, RosAsm
Disassembler will do this in a couple of seconds, with
recovering all of the original PE components at once. Not
so bad... ;)
Betov.
PS. V.1.12a uploaded... with the new Debugger.
hutch--
> What do you mean to discuss with a guy who introduces himself
> as the "Author of MASM32" ?! :))
Thats interesting, I have always responded to the handle "hutch--" and
just about everyone and their dog knows that I maintain the MASM32
project.
Others may not be as familiar with Betov over time but it is a matter
of fact that he stole commercial software to write his own assembler
and continues to illegally distribute the derivation of that software.
This is while claiming to be a GPL guru but I will make the point
again, stealing commercial software and distributing its derivation is
not part of the GPL system and Betov is a fake for trying it.
Differing from the risk that anyone foolish enough to develop under
BetovAsm is exposed to, people who develop under MASM have a legal
Microsoft EULA to protect them and what they write is legally their
own and they can distribute it any way they like.
Now if Betov ever gets his disassembler off the ground so that it
actually does something useful instead of the vapourware we have kept
hearing, we already know what he intended it for by simply listening
to what he has already said, it is to be used to steal code from other
peoples software for insertion into programs build with his own
assembler.
This is fine for your own binary code but it is sofware piracy to
steal other peoples code and needs to be seen that way.
Now if any late comers wonder why Betov has his arguments spat back
into his own face on a regular basis, it is because he started the
debate years ago on the assumption that he had some advantage in his
approach. He has kept losing the debate and has continued to behave
like a pregnant schoolgirl with tantrums and abuse and the only way he
will ever get peace is to shut his mouth and stop foulmouthing other
people and their work.
It would not be wise to hold your breath waiting for him to behave so
get used to the idea that Betov is an easy free kick every time he
opens his mouth.
JGCasey
>
> "Gerhard W. Gruber" <spar...@gmx.at> wrote in message
> news:ai57109oanq2hj09g...@4ax.com...
> > On Sat, 24 Jan 2004 21:15:31 GMT wrote "Randall Hyde"
> > <rand...@earthlink.net> in alt.lang.asm with
> > <TfBQb.25146$1e....@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net>
>
> Then again, I've been reading Rene's posts for quite some time. So
> I've got the benefit of history in order to infer his meanings here.
> No, he did not *explicitly* say "we're going to use this to steal
> copyrighted code." OTOH, he did say that he was going to use
> the program to extract useful subroutines from C programs. Given
> his past disdane for commercial apps and lack of respect for
> their copyrights, I just don't see him being too concerned about
> the copy rights of others.
Great to see even a professor can misspell a word :)
Or is that how Americans spell disdain??
[this relates to a Beth post]
JC
[snip]
Randall Hyde
"JGCasey" <kjc...@hotkey.net.au> wrote in message
news:40147...@news.iprimus.com.au...
> >
> > Then again, I've been reading Rene's posts for quite some time. So
> > I've got the benefit of history in order to infer his meanings here.
> > No, he did not *explicitly* say "we're going to use this to steal
> > copyrighted code." OTOH, he did say that he was going to use
> > the program to extract useful subroutines from C programs. Given
> > his past disdane for commercial apps and lack of respect for
> > their copyrights, I just don't see him being too concerned about
> > the copy rights of others.
>
> Great to see even a professor can misspell a word :)
>
> Or is that how Americans spell disdain??
Then again, are posts to *this* newsgroup worth the
effort of a proof-read?
I freely admit that I rarely crank out perfect prose
(or code, for that matter) on the first attempt. I have
found spelling mistakes, for example, in the published
edition of AoA even after it's been proofread dozens
of times by myself, hundreds or thousands of times
by students, and by two profressional proofreaders.
Sometimes, you just have to go with the flow :-)
Cheers,
Randy Hyde
Gerhard W. Gruber
<XnF947BDEBA79...@213.228.0.33>
>3) When a programmer means to switch from any other Language
>to Asm, he may like to recover some of his previous works
>in Assembly. Such a Tool is supposed to make this very
>easy (and, by the way,... very pedagogic).
Today I was thinkning about this disassembler approach and suddenly I noticed
what it is, what makes it really hard to use this as a recignized feature for
code reusage. Even if you manage to disassemble perfectly, so that you can
discern all data and all code you still face a major problem. You can't
disassemble structures and constants.
One of the main features of a symbolc assembler is to have names for values.
i.E. O_RDWR for one of the open flags. So if your disassembler could also
recognice which function call you are calling, and from that determine which
name a value equeates to, you still have the problem of userdefined values and
of course structures. If a function takes a structure as an argument, but the
caller only filles some values of it, you can never determine how large the
structure should be. This means that you will very often produce code which is
simply wrong.
>
>4) Inside the Open Sources Mouvement, translating, say, a
>C App to Asm is not a so trivial task. It is, anyway, always
C to ASM is VERY easy. :) Every compiler can do this, so you will have a
syntactical correct assembler sourcefile. The other way around is the problem.
Actually I use this feature of C compiler very often when I have to hunt bugs
which I can't find otherwise. I already found two bugs in Visual C where it
created wrong code. In such a case I usually turn on the assembler output and
examine that to get all the symbols, adresses and of course the code itself.
>a _long_ task to do this by hand. In many cases, RosAsm
>Disassembler will do this in a couple of seconds, with
>recovering all of the original PE components at once. Not
>so bad... ;)
The PE content is rather boring. What is interesting, from a coder point of
view, is all the values and this stuff, because that is what you usually
include via include files.
Frank Kotler
> Then again, are posts to *this* newsgroup worth the
> effort of a proof-read?
Naw! It's just a flaim war.
Best,
Frank
Beth
> However, if even *this* is breaking of patent laws, to study e.g
OOP, and
> learn from it what not to do, and then call that a derivative work,
and then
> beeing related to patent laws....hmm...if this would be true, then
there is
> no possibility to create anything new. Someone might say that it
builds on
> the knowlegde from the past, e.g, that it is derivative work of
early DOS
> patents. Hey it uses Intel memonics...it builds on someone elses
work !
As either Plato or Socrate or Aristotle said (can never remember which
and can't be bothered to check it up again, as I'm feeling lazy...but
it's one of this "triad" of philosophers who taught each other ;):
"There is nothing new under the Sun"
Indeed, you could claim that, basically, everything is a "derivative
work" in some sense...but, simply, the law isn't that pedantic...law
concerns itself with _practicalities_ essentially, not
"philosophies"...and that's why this stuff goes in front of a judge,
who hears the evidence for and against, and then exercises his
_opinion_ on whether this is "reasonable coincidence" or whether you
really did just steal it from the other party...indeed, though one
shouldn't speak it too loudly, lest encourage theft, _IF_ you can
steal some intellectual property and the other party can't actually
_prove_ "beyond reasonable doubt", as required by law, then you'll get
away with it...it's not advisable that you try, mind you, because if
they _can_ prove it - remembering that things like "statistical
analysis" (does your code statistically match up with the original
code by a percentage more than is statistically attributable to
"coincidence"? There's a whole field of statistics dealing with
"critical values" and such, which are used to judge whether something
is likely "coincidence" or whether there's large grounds for suspicion
that they are, in fact, _related_ :) are perfectly acceptable as forms
of evidence before the judge - then you are simply buggered...seeing
as it's considered "reasonable" to be "inspired" by something else -
so long as your implementation is 100% _yours_ and we're not stepping
on any "patents" (different to copyright but something else related
that must be considered...with "patents", it doesn't matter if you've
come up with an identical implementation _totally by coincidence_,
you're _still_ not allowed to use it...this is because copyright
protects "intellectual property" but patents protect someone's "right
to make money out of their ideas"...one useful thing, though, with
patents is that they must be defined _specifically_, down to the
smallest detail so this makes it more unlikely for you to be "treading
on their toes", if you honestly did come up with your ideas
independently...but, even if you did so completely honestly, if you're
in breach of a patent, _tough cookies_, the party who owns the patent
_is_ given the right to force you to stop producing / selling
immediately...unfair? Perhaps and I wouldn't completely disagree...but
it's _law_ whether that law is fair or not) - then it seems like a
risk that simply isn't worth taking...
As to your "derivative work" problem, there's actually a simple answer
for you...you know, when I quoted Plato or Socrates or Aristotle...or
if I was to quote Shakespeare...or, for instance, I might decide to
use Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" classical music for a
platform game about a miner who's slightly "manic"...or, if I used a
graphic of Da Vinci's last supper in one of my computer programs...
This stuff is all perfectly legal...the reason being that, after a set
period of time, the copyright on something disappears and it's
automatically put into the "public domain"...most classical music is
completely free of copyright because the composers are long since
dead...which is why those big ochestras can play a bit of Mozart and
then record it onto a CD and sell it, without this breaching Mozart's
copyright...his works are now 100% "public domain"...
In fact, as I hinted at with my "Manic Miner" example above, you can
find some of the older computer games using lots of classical music
when the programmer themselves were no good at composing music (this
doesn't happen so much these days, simply because writing programs is
usually done in teams with specialised "musicians" and "graphic
designers" and so forth who can create their own professional quality
stuff...but, in the old days, there'd be one programmer who had to do
their own music and graphics as well as code the games :)...the reason
is that it's pretty easy to get sheet music of any classical melody
and then program it into your game and there's not a single worry
about "copyright" at all because the composer is long since
dead...hence, the classic "Manic Miner" computer game can be seen to
exploit this by having "In the Hall of the Mountain King" playing
throughout the game in the background and I think it's "The Sugar Plum
Fairy" on the title screen (obviously, Matthew Smith, the author,
enjoys operatic music, as these come from operas ;)...
A painting by Da Vinci would also be free of copyright...the Complete
Works of Shakespeare are also copyright free...although, _BE
CAREFUL_...though Mozart or Beethoven's works are, indeed, copyright
free, you _couldn't_ sample the London Symphony Ochestra playing one
of their works and then use that in a computer game...the reason? The
music is copyright-free BUT that _particular recording_ isn't...so,
play the music yourself (say, with a synthesiser and some sheet music
:) and that's perfectly okay...but if you copy the song off of some
"London Symphony Ochestra" CD, then you're breaking the copyright _on
that recording_...
This is, by the way, _how_ you can have those "tribute bands" who play
old Abba hits or whatever and they don't get into trouble...note,
though, on modern music, the lyrics and melodies are probably still
under copyright...but, at least in this country, to accomodate bands
who do "cover versions", you can purchase a "licence" and then are
free to do whatever you like and the music industry splits the money
for that licence...in other words, because so many bands want to do
"cover versions" of things under copyright, they devised a system
which allowed that to happen without too much complication and without
annoying the record companies...playing "cover versions" of songs in
public places without one of these licences is actually technically
illegal (mind you, so is playing music in a pub or club...jukeboxes
are okay _only_ because they are specially licenced...in fact, it's
normally the music people themselves who happily fill up those
jukeboxes in a special deal because of the publicity it gives
them...but if you're in a pub or club and they have just put a CD on
some ordinary hi-fi they've along from home, that's actually a breach
of copyright ;)...
There are also exceptions about "non-commercial educational use" and
"fair quotation" and exceptions added to allow people to write reviews
(so that a book reviewer is permitted "fair quotation" to pull out
small extracts of the book and quote them as part of the review - you
know, stuff like "read this section of the first chapter to see how
beautiful the prose really is" or something - and that kind of thing
:)...the exceptions being made here, of course, because writing
reviews or providing educational content would be made very difficult
or impossible without this...and, in these cases, you're not breaking
copyright to steal their ideas to make money...though, you've still
got to watch _how much you quote_ because if I, for example, quoted an
entire book on a freely available internet site then though I may not
be personally making money out of that, I'm _still_ stealing from
them...that is, if there was a complete book for free on someone
website, then why on Earth buy the book (which, in fact, is why
Randy's insistance on AoA staying on his website free of charge is a
remarkable deal he managed to get his publishers to agree with...and
Rene's accusations of "personal glory" are so, so, so wide of the mark
because many publishers would happily _refuse_ such a deal...and,
indeed, whatever royalties Randy might get off the book, he's eating
into his own money by also providing the free version...Randy's, in
fact, gone and done something totally _opposite_ to some "fame and
fortune" thing by doing so...he's _taken a financial hit_ in order to
"be nice" and help promote assembly language by keeping the free
version on-line...Randy's too bloody modest to point out these things
but I can happily confirm to you that he's hardly what people like
Rene make out...the _complete opposite_...as some have remarked, "an
assembly angel", so to speak ;)?
It's a minefield of exceptions...you're really _strongly advised_ to
seek legal advice if you're doing something serious and you're not
sure...
But, anyway, you'd kind of be right to suggest that "doesn't this make
_everything_ a derived work?"...except that, in fact, copyright
_expires_...the actual amount of time this takes after someone's death
(and whether it's permitted for the copyright to be "inherited"...for
example, I think - stress on "think" - that Jim Henson's Muppets have
been inherited copyright-wise by his children...Mickey Mouse and
Disney characters certainly have (despite being in deep freeze with
the prospect of perhaps being restored one day, Walt is considered to
be "dead" in legal terms...if the stories I've heard are correct, his
heart _did_ stop and he was technically dead when they froze him so
this isn't an odd legal decision to take...the idea, I suppose, is
that when they can cure his illness in the future, they'll also be
able to "cure" his "temporary" death at the same time...yeah, kind of
insane, I know...but, well, Walt's got the money so let him spend
it...you never know, he might end up running around after I'm dead,
having the last laugh that he was right all along to believe that it
could be done ;)...I think probably some characters like Winnie the
Pooh or whatever have had their copyright "transferred"...because, as
well as "inheritance" of copyright, you can also quite happily
transfer or sell it too...so, if ever J.K.Rowling's millions vanish
and she's strapped for cash, one way she can get rich again is by
simply selling "Harry Potter and related characters" onto some
company...which is why creating characters like Harry Potter, Kermit
the Frog and others is such an unbelieve "cash cow"...you don't just
have the money on the books and films and stuff...you can also sell
the characters themselves...or, at least, you sell the copyright to
them...hence, if you've ever thought up some Buzz Lightyear or Bobba
Fett character yourself, then hold onto that copyright for dear
life...Mario, Sonic or Lara Croft would give a very, very nice
"pension" in your retirement :)...
And, one nice little thing is that if there's some Hollywood movie
that was "inspired" by Shakespeare and you produce something similar
yourself, then if they take it to court, simply claim "I was inspired
by Shakespeare, as they were, and didn't steal it"...well,
Shakespeare's not under copyright and his works are 100% public
domain...there's no case to answer for there (so long as you've not
also breached some obvious part of the Hollywood movie that _is_ under
their copyright...like you couldn't call your main character "Kermit
the Frog", as you also use a Charles Dickens' "Scrooge" story as your
base...but call him "Johnny the Toad" and make him look different
enough from Kermit and you might just get away with it :)...this bit
is very useful, indeed, because the classic writers and composers and
so forth "inspire" a heck of a lot of things (such as "a Muppet's
Christmas Carol" or that Hollywood "Romeo and Juliet" with Leonardo de
Cappuchino or whatever his name is ;)...
Plus, here's another useful exception - one I might "borrow" in
future - is that "parodies" are also exempt...that's how something
like "Scary Movie" can be a parody of a hundred different movies
without breaching copyright...because they are poking fun and it's all
a "parody" then they are exempted...I mean, fair's fair to the
law...it might appear "stuffy" to look at but allowing this exception
shows that they _do_ actually respect the human right to have a good
laugh at things and can have a sense of humour, even when copyright is
involved...
Blah-blah-blah...so, in practice, things may, indeed, be "derivative
works" but there's exceptions and also copyright eventually expires
after someone's death (how long exactly it last for after the author
dies is country-specific :)...so it's 100% legal to have a "derivative
work" of Shakespeare or Mozart...kind of useful, that, really, seeing
as they "invented" an awful lot of the "conventions" people still use
today...indeed, you're allowed to say the word "eyeball" (which was
actually invented by Shakespeare...there's tons of words that he just
"made up" for his plays which are now in the English language ;)
because Shakespeare's long dead and his copyright has gone so it's now
part of the "public domain" and part of the English language
itself...but if these laws were in effect and Shakespeare was still
around, then he could actually try to sue you for writing a play
called "Eyeball" or whatever...
Another useful thing is that ordinary conversations are
exempt...hence, depsite my joke below, it's okay for people to say
things like "Coke", "Pepsi", "Lara Croft", "Harry Potter" in ordinary
non-commercial conservation...and, anyway, it's only a breach of
copyright _IF_ the owners sue and the judge decides I have broken
it...in other words, if Coke read this and think: "hey, I'm not
complaining, she's giving us all free advertising there!" and don't
take it to court, that's also perfectly okay (though it is generally a
bad idea to just _presume_ "oh, they probably won't mind"...as, if
they actually do, then you could be in serious trouble :)...
Disclaimer: All names, characters and other copyrighted material
remains the sole copyright of their copyright holders and are merely
quoted for illustrative purposes under Berne Convention exceptions of
"fair use"...
Disclaimer: I am NOT a lawyer nor do I have any recognised legal
qualifications...this is offered as ordinary conversation only and
should NOT be contrued in any way as "legal advice"...as with any
matter of law, _consult a legal professional_ if in doubt...any
actions taken based on what's been said in this post by me is done so
at a person's own risk, as I do NOT endorse or encourage any such
action and advise that the opinion of an actual legally qualified
person should always be sought...don't just take the word of someone
who's spouting off nonsense like I am...as always, apply common sense
and caution at all points to ensure that you are, indeed, in
compliance with the law...blah-blah-blah ;)...
Beth :)
Beth
> 1 - Yeah...i am a lawyer. And no, i did not graduated at hong
> kong...And you don't understood what i tried to explain.
Well, indeed you may be so...I am unaware of anything to suggest your
assertions to be otherwise...
But I would like to remark that it deeply surprises me, therefore, to
find you using what I would personally deem as "careless
language"...as, in my personal experience, lawyers are usually
excellent students of immensely accurate language...or, in situations
where they are employing a language to which they do not have the
required skills of accurate use of language, I have had the personal
experience that lawyers would ordinarily tend to apply a cautionary
use of that language, so as not to accidentally construe inaccuracies
through ambiguous or flawed expression...
These, though, are only personal observations I would make in the
generalised case, of course...I recognise that in specific instances,
this need not necessarily be the case...and, therefore, the
juxtaposition of these comments should not be construed to imply
otherwise...I just felt that I could not fail to remark on my personal
surprise in this instance, at finding the situation to be in stark
contrast to my personal expectations as to what I'd presume to be the
case from a legal professional...
As I'm sure you'll perfectly understand...
Beth ;)
Beth
> Randy wrote:
> > ... reverse engineering (i.e., yo, ho, ho).
>
> Prof. Hyde,
>
> You're not implying that all reverse engineering is piracy, are you?
> Legally I believe the term piracy pertains only to robbing ships. :)
Indeed; And, in the UK, "piracy" (as in "robbing ships" :) is, along
with "high treason", the only crimes in this country which still carry
the possibility of a death penalty! Though, in practice, I suspect
that the sentence would actually be reduced and changes finally made
to the law to bring this into line with the rest of the statute books
were anyone actually charged and convicted on this most grossly
unlikely of crimes in modern times ;)...
Actually, just as a curiosity to mention in passing, European law
actually permits reverse engineering of copyrighted materials in
_certain express conditions_ which aren't permitted under American
law...also, the laws of "exception" and "expiry" are country-specific
and not governed in their entireity by the Berne Convention alone...
Hence, this all seems, to me, to be a bit of a nonsense to consider
that this stuff can be talked about in such "broad-brush" terms on an
international forum...
It would be remiss of me not to remind everyone that there is actually
no such thing as "international law" in itself...but merely
international agreements and treaties and so forth between nations for
their laws to fall into compliance with conventions such as the Berne
Convention...ultimately, though, the law of the land - whatever land
that might be - prevails in any specific instance...the phrase
"international law" is not an entity in itself but merely a kind of
shorthand for "national law that falls into compliance with
obligations to international agreements and treaties" (which is a bit
of a mouthful so "international law" is the common substitute there
:)...
What Rene is permitted to reverse engineer is not actually the same as
what Randy is permitted to do...due to European Union directives to
"standardise" all this, though, I'd probably fall under much the same
categories of "permissible reverse engineering" that Rene (or Gerhard)
would fall under...American law on this subject is actually generally
tighter...though, indeed, EU law is NOT so relaxed as I think is being
implied in the general conversation here...there is a base of the
"Berne Convention" (and similar for patents but I confess to not
knowing the name of those international agreements governing that)...
Oh, actually, though, _IF_ we actually do have copyright experts in
our midst, what would be the issues relating to using MIDI tunes of
modern copyrighted music in a program? That is, only the notes are
copyrighted, the performance and software synthesiser and so forth
would be original...this would be a non-commercial exercise but
released to the public...just wondering about that, as it would be
nice to include some music into a program I want to write and it would
be good to have a more modern tune rather than the old "use a
classical composition because they aren't copyrighted" trick...there's
a better choice of "appropriate" music in the modern stuff than the
classical repetoire, you see ;)
Beth :)
Beth
> I don't think that this is a good idea, but then again. That
approach would be
> VERY hard to apply to some commercial app anyway, as it takes quite
a lot of
> time to "reuse" a nice function from i.E. MS Word. I doubt that
anybody, who
> is in his right mind, will reverse engineer Word jsut to get a
function out of
> it. The amount of work involved is in no relation to the benefit you
gain, so
> this already makes the disassembling approach only usefull, as a
tool for
> reusing code, for apps where you already know the code quite well,
which
> limits it to your own code mostly.
Agreed; But Randy has a point to note that there is an _implication_
here in Rene's comments because if this is "own code" or other GPL
works then why do you not already possess the source code? GPL
guarantees that it must be available or it's a breach of
licence...it's possible that you could lose your own source code and
need to reverse engineer a binary to attempt to recover that source
code...but, then, wouldn't the advocacy of making better back-ups and
so forth be a much easier strategy to prevent such a situation
happening than creating a reverse engineering tool?
Indeed, Rene has NOT advocated illegal use but it's hard to appreciate
many circumstances where the need would be required regularly by any
legal use...with something like IDApro, it's a separate tool,
specifically designed - one would imagine - for the rare situation
where, indeed, you need to recover source code from a binary due to
loss or something like that...but it's an integral feature of RosAsm
and Rene _has_ implied _regular use_ of his reverse engineering
feature as part of ordinary development in his comments with the
suggestion that the reverse engineering facility _will_ make a drastic
impact to the effectiveness and productivity of the RosAsm user (if it
was used infrequently for the rare occasion of recovering lost source
code, how could it really be making anywhere near the "drastic
improvement" he has implied it will do?)...
These, to my mind, all seem very difficult to resolve with each other
from Rene's comments, without, indeed, arousing _suspicion_ about the
final "intended use"...hence, it may be buried somewhat deeply in
Rene's comments but I would suggest that it _has_ been implied, as the
entireity of his comments can't really be resolved in too many
different ways...
Although, of course, Rene is speaking a foreign language when he
speaks English and, therefore, it's quite possible that any such
implication was purely accidental and there's a quite reasonable,
legal explanation for it and I've simply misunderstood what he was
attempting to say...or, at least, that's what I can repeat in court,
is you like ;)
Beth :)
Beth
> Then again, I've been reading Rene's posts for quite some time. So
> I've got the benefit of history in order to infer his meanings here.
> No, he did not *explicitly* say "we're going to use this to steal
> copyrighted code." OTOH, he did say that he was going to use
> the program to extract useful subroutines from C programs.
Background information:
Rene has stated that he can't program C...therefore, at the very
least, he's going to be needing "permission" to proceed in every
instance of this "extracting useful subroutines from C programs" until
he learns to read and write C code himself...
Beth :)
Beth
> Great to see even a professor can misspell a word :)
Ah, but, then again, unless the professor is a professor of the
English language, there's actually no reason why we should presume
that all of them can...you'd kind of expect it, sure, as you're bound
to pick something up reading lots of textbooks and writing your
own...but it's not automatic or implied or anything...
I've done some small amount of proof-reading work before and you'd be
amazed by how crap even _writers_ - who's specific occupation is
_exactly_ the correct manipulation of language - can be at
times...and, anyway, _everyone's_ first drafts tend to be crap and
full of typos...I know I regularly cringe at reading back some of my
posts later off the group when it's too late to retract them, staring
at "it's" where, of course, it should have been "its" instead...but
that's because I only do the most minimal of "proof-reading" before
posting - just quickly reading over it once more before hitting
"send" - that if it gets missed then it gets posted ;)
And, yeah, Randy, I did see all the typos and stuff in AoA...but,
well, one should get pedantic in the right circumstances, I feel...it
was understandable and it isn't meant to be some "role model textbook
on English usage" so you just let these things go (if it was a
textbook about English, though, you would have received a flood of
Emails, I assure you ;)...plus, anyway, surely your publisher insists
on and provides professional proof-readers before publication that I
would have been wasting my time, once it was clear it was going to be
published? Though, clearly, _some_ publishers are becoming more
neglectful of this (no, Microsoft Word's spell checker is NOT good
enough, trust me ;), most still remember what the word "professional"
is meant to imply :)...
In fact, Randy, regards your invitation that I could write some
articles for Webster, perhaps, I'm in two minds whether to actually
decline on those same "professionalism" grounds...my writing style is
way too weird (delibrately so, mind you, to aid "free flow" but,
nevertheless, NOT "professional" by any means) unless someone wants to
volunteer turning "BethSpeak" into actual Plain English...no, I could
force myself to write in that horrible "conventional" way other people
do, I suppose *sigh* ;)
> Or is that how Americans spell disdain??
It's a Californian variation, perhaps? ;)
Beth :)
Beth
> Even if you manage to disassemble perfectly, so that you can
> discern all data and all code you still face a major problem. You
can't
> disassemble structures and constants.
Indeed; But Rene's "real" assembler doesn't support structures because
they are "anti-assembly"...as for constants, they don't currently
appear to be "anti-assembly" but I suppose he can _excuse_ this by
suggesting hard-coding constants is "specific assembly"...
You're exactly right that, without these kinds of things, it's all a
bit useless...but, note, Rene's "assembler" and "philosophy" works
like that already, let alone his "two-clicks reassembly(tm)"
concepts...
Beth :)
The Half A Wannabee
"Beth" <BethS...@hotmail.NOSPICEDHAM.com> wrote in message
news:hLpRb.49$sR3...@newsfep3-gui.server.ntli.net...
;-) Just tellin you I am still here. Thanks for the clearification. I think
you would be a damn good lawyer. While reading questions arose, but I said
to myself..Shes going to come to it, relax, and you did. No questions
needed. Where is my spanking for the RosAsm vs H(e)ll Spawn ?
The Half A Wannabee
> JGCasey wrote:
> volunteer turning "BethSpeak" into actual Plain English...no, I could
> force myself to write in that horrible "conventional" way other people
> do, I suppose *sigh* ;)
No . Keep going, full steam ahead. ;-)
Robert Redelmeier
> were anyone actually charged and convicted on this
> most grossly unlikely of crimes in modern times ;)...
Actually, pirates still sail the seven seas and are a
serious menace. Pleasure craft are still hijacked in the
Caribbean by drug-smugglers, and commercial vessels face
piracy in a number of areas, most notoriously the Straits
of Molacca.
To equate unauthorized copying with these extremely
brutal acts is a travesty.
-- Robert
Betov
$sR3...@newsfep3-gui.server.ntli.net:
> These, to my mind, all seem very difficult to resolve with each other
> from Rene's comments, without, indeed, arousing _suspicion_ about the
> final "intended use"...hence, it may be buried somewhat deeply in
> Rene's comments but I would suggest that it _has_ been implied, as the
> entireity of his comments can't really be resolved in too many
> different ways...
>
? Really ?
Well i thought i always expressed as clearly as possible
that 1) I am going GPL. 2) The proper place for Closed
Sources Apps and Commercial App is the trash bin. 3) that
i am not interrested in any way, and do not feel concerned,
at all, with piracy.
Recovering lost Sources is, evidently, one of the cases such
a "two-Clicks-Disassembler-reassembler" concept may be
fully interresting. But, not only. (I have already provided
several times the list of goals with this feature, so i will
not do it one more time, as anyway, the propaganda guys like
Hutch and Master Pdf, will _never_ consider _anything_ but
what they mean to "prove").
In any case, there _can_ not be _any_ legal problem with
RosAsm: It is GPLed, designed to work under a GPLed OS,
inside a GPL world. Period.
Betov.
< http://betov.free.fr/RosAsm.html >
Gerhard W. Gruber
<BethS...@hotmail.NOSPICEDHAM.com> wrote in alt.lang.asm with MID
<1vqRb.63$sR3...@newsfep3-gui.server.ntli.net>:
>Agreed; But Randy has a point to note that there is an _implication_
>here in Rene's comments because if this is "own code" or other GPL
>works then why do you not already possess the source code? GPL
Yes. But since Rene doesn't know C and a compiler is much faster in
translating a C code to assembler, this could be easily used to convert the
file to ASM. You compile it and then diassemble it straight to RosAsm syntax.
Much faster and cleaner then doing this by hand via sourcecode.
>Indeed, Rene has NOT advocated illegal use but it's hard to appreciate
>many circumstances where the need would be required regularly by any
>legal use...with something like IDApro, it's a separate tool,
>specifically designed - one would imagine - for the rare situation
>where, indeed, you need to recover source code from a binary due to
IDA Pro is quite different. i.E. Companies like McAffee use this to analyse
the code of virii and of course there may be many other usefull things which
are also not illegal. I also use it sometimes when I work for Wine in order to
determine how a function exactly works. I already used IDA Pro to create a
disassembly of my own code, which I wrote myself in C because sometimes it is
usefull. When I have a crash at a client then I only get the address where the
crash occured, with a register dump. Disassembling my own code then shows me
eaxctly in which sourceline the crash happened and from the registerdump I can
determine what happend. :) So you see there are some uses. Of coure this is
not the regular case, but it IS helpfull from time to time.
>loss or something like that...but it's an integral feature of RosAsm
>and Rene _has_ implied _regular use_ of his reverse engineering
>feature as part of ordinary development in his comments with the
>suggestion that the reverse engineering facility _will_ make a drastic
Yes. Because he is unwilling to see the advantages of libraries. Actually, by
writing this disassembler and declaring for what it is really intended is
prove that he sees the need for a library facillity, but he is unwilling to
give in that others are right, so he invents this weird approach.
I also think that he overestimates the value of a disassembler in opposition
to a library, but I guess he will see that for himself.
>impact to the effectiveness and productivity of the RosAsm user (if it
>was used infrequently for the rare occasion of recovering lost source
>code, how could it really be making anywhere near the "drastic
>improvement" he has implied it will do?)...
Because this will be Rene's library linker. :)
>These, to my mind, all seem very difficult to resolve with each other
>from Rene's comments, without, indeed, arousing _suspicion_ about the
>final "intended use"...hence, it may be buried somewhat deeply in
Well, if he really wants to propagate piracy with his disassembler? He could
simply say he does it for fun or because he needs it for something else. I
wrote my disassembler for two reason. It was intersting at that time and I
could make use of it for detecting memory leaks by injecting code into an
existing DLL/EXE. Claiming you write a disassembler for librarylinking to
cover for piracy is IMO quite a stupid explanation. So either Rene is very
clever because he really intends piracy and using this argument because others
might consider it so unbelievable that they will think it is true, or he is
very stupid to openly advance piracy directly, because then he will get into
big trouble.
>Although, of course, Rene is speaking a foreign language when he
>speaks English and, therefore, it's quite possible that any such
>implication was purely accidental and there's a quite reasonable,
>legal explanation for it and I've simply misunderstood what he was
>attempting to say...or, at least, that's what I can repeat in court,
>is you like ;)
:)
Gerhard W. Gruber
<XnF947D8CED7B...@213.228.0.133>
>In any case, there _can_ not be _any_ legal problem with
>RosAsm: It is GPLed, designed to work under a GPLed OS,
>inside a GPL world. Period.
I wouldn't be so sure about this. Napster was freely available. I don't know
if it was GPL, maybe not, but that doesn't change a thing. Even if Napster
would have been GPL he still would have been put to court and taken down, as
it was the case. Not because Napster is illegal, but the primary use it was
used for. If the laywers could have proven that the Authors primary goal was
copyright infringement, then he would have most probably gone to jail. So if
your disassembler is coded by the intention to help copyrightinfringment
(which I don't really believe anyway), then it is of no concern wether the
tool is GPL or closed.
The DeCSS coder was also in court in Norwegen for jsut that reason. If the
case would have been done in the US I think the outcome would have been quite
different. So being in France may help you a little bit, but I wouldn't bet on
it.
Gerhard W. Gruber
<BethS...@hotmail.NOSPICEDHAM.com> in alt.lang.asm with
<VYqRb.72$sR3...@newsfep3-gui.server.ntli.net>
>Indeed; But Rene's "real" assembler doesn't support structures because
>they are "anti-assembly"...as for constants, they don't currently
>appear to be "anti-assembly" but I suppose he can _excuse_ this by
>suggesting hard-coding constants is "specific assembly"...
That doesn't help. Even if he doesn't support structures by itself, he still
have to have some notion about it, because a structure requires a certain
amount of memory. If the code, which is disassembled, will only manipulate
some fields of that structure, then how does the person, disassembling the
code, know how large the memoryblock should be? I guess code which is
potentially to be disassmbled will be some stuff which is hard to write
yourself like decoding an audio/videostream or similar things. And this code
will get som buffer which may have to have a certain size, which the guy will
have no knowledge about, unless he also disassembles the caller. That's where
I say the usefullness will stop, because, even if someone is determined enough
to do some disassembling, there is only so much time you can sepnd on it.
Considering how well wine does, and how many people are involved, you can
easily determine how well a lone person will do wich HAS to disassemble some
code just to get some functionality. Either he will switch to another IDE
which makes it easier, or he will look for some open code he can adapt.
>You're exactly right that, without these kinds of things, it's all a
>bit useless...but, note, Rene's "assembler" and "philosophy" works
>like that already, let alone his "two-clicks reassembly(tm)"
>concepts...
I know. But if it works for him, it still has to prove its usefullness by the
users.
Betov
> On Tue, 27 Jan 2004 10:15:16 -0000 wrote "Beth"
> <BethS...@hotmail.NOSPICEDHAM.com> in alt.lang.asm with
> <VYqRb.72$sR3...@newsfep3-gui.server.ntli.net>
>
>>Indeed; But Rene's "real" assembler doesn't support structures because
>>they are "anti-assembly"...as for constants, they don't currently
>>appear to be "anti-assembly" but I suppose he can _excuse_ this by
>>suggesting hard-coding constants is "specific assembly"...
>
> That doesn't help. Even if he doesn't support structures by itself, he
> still have to have some notion about it, because a structure requires
> a certain amount of memory. If the code, which is disassembled, will
> only manipulate some fields of that structure, then how does the
> person, disassembling the code, know how large the memoryblock should
> be? I guess code which is potentially to be disassmbled will be some
> stuff which is hard to write yourself like decoding an
> audio/videostream or similar things. And this code will get som buffer
> which may have to have a certain size, which the guy will have no
> knowledge about, unless he also disassembles the caller. That's where
> I say the usefullness will stop, because, even if someone is
> determined enough to do some disassembling, there is only so much time
> you can sepnd on it. Considering how well wine does, and how many
> people are involved, you can easily determine how well a lone person
> will do wich HAS to disassemble some code just to get some
> functionality. Either he will switch to another IDE which makes it
> easier, or he will look for some open code he can adapt.
Gerhard, the Structures Recognition is not yet
implemented. As i am not used to "sell" VaporeWare ;)
i will not comment on what this "will" possibly be.
But, generally speacking, i am in the opinion that
a Tool that does effectively "something" is better
than no Tool at all.
Talking of the RosAsm Disassembler, i have always
said that this kind of computation can only have a
_statistical_ success rate. The higher rate the better.
Period. ;)
Betov.
< http://betov.free.fr/RosAsm.html >
hutch--
> that 1) I am going GPL.
Yeah, by writing an assembler that only works in Windows and then it
only sems to work when it reassembles itself.
2) The proper place for Closed
> Sources Apps and Commercial App is the trash bin.
Nah, you put TRASH like BetovAsm in the trashbin, especially as it was
derived from STOLEN commercial software. When are you going to come
clean over this Betov and admit you are a crook stealing other peoples
intellectual property ?
3) that
> i am not interrested in any way, and do not feel concerned,
> at all, with piracy.
Yeah, we have noticed your views on software piracy when you made
statements about using the new BetovRipOff Tool to steal other people
code. Lucky for you that it will never get off the ground in any
viable useful way. Anyone who needs a decent disassembler will use IDA
pro anyway which they can download for FREE !!!!!
>
> Recovering lost Sources is, evidently, one of the cases such
> a "two-Clicks-Disassembler-reassembler" concept may be
> fully interresting. But, not only.
Yeah yeah, we know the pipedream but we also know the real purpose of
it to rip of other peioples code because the assembler is not powerful
enough to create and use libraries.
> several times the list of goals with this feature, so i will
> not do it one more time, as anyway, the propaganda guys like
> Hutch and Master Pdf, will _never_ consider _anything_ but
> what they mean to "prove").
Cruel ain't it, get caught with your pants down sprouting bullsh*t and
your critics are the bad guys for catching you out again.
> In any case, there _can_ not be _any_ legal problem with
> RosAsm: It is GPLed, designed to work under a GPLed OS,
> inside a GPL world. Period.
Lets seperate the issues here, GPL is a software licencing system to
share code beween authors and those who would like to work on it to
improve it, not a cover up for stolen commercial software that has
been used to ilegally distribute the results. GPL is a legitimate
system where stealing commercial software is not.
LINUX and similar are GPL licenced operating systems based on a UNIX
design, there is no reason to assume the ReactOS will ever get off the
ground and if it did, Microsoft would kill it for copyright
infringement.
When will you delete that pile of illegal crap and support LINUX with
true GPL software that was not STOLEN from commercial software ?
Frank Kotler
> Agreed; But Randy has a point to note that there is an _implication_
> here in Rene's comments because if this is "own code" or other GPL
> works then why do you not already possess the source code?
There's a *big* difference between having source code, and having source
code in RosAsm syntax! I don't know what Betov's got in mind (he might
not object too strenuously to some "Robin Hood work"), but to me, that's
the big plus. In the LuxAsm world, for example, we'd be able to
auto-convert Linux to LuxAsm syntax and start chopping that C cruft out
of it! :)
Best,
Frank
Betov
@posting.google.com:
> [...]
Ah! Not yet dead Dictionary ass? Too bad.
Now, the fucky one who promotes the idea
that GPL is inheritable is explaining me
what GPL is. Nice.
The fucky one who re-distributes a stolen
MicroSoft Product by playing the loophole
game with a legal failure of MASM EULA, says
that i wrote SpAsm with a stolen Software.
The free versions of two Sharewares, for the
ones who would not yet know. Great.
The fucky one who introduces himself with
sentences like "I am the Author of MASM32"
While he writes his pathetic Applications
in Power Basic is saying that my two++ Megas
of working Assembly Sources are "crap". OK.
:) you know Hutch, recently, i made up my
mind that i had no more enough time ahead
for trying to limit you actions. I am afraid
history is going to take care of you faster
than i ever could. :)) So, i do not need to
save more of your "interresting" Posts in
B_U_Asm, in order to keep track of who is
who and of who did what, for some not so far
future.
On one hand, you have produced much enough of
such "materials" to make everybody happy. On
the other hand, i have yet some collecting
work on Master Pdf ones, because, as he is,
way more viscious than you are, appropriated
documentation is not that easy to collect and
to organise. So you will excuse me, if, in the
next coming months, i take much less care of
your pathetic attacks.
Betov.
< http://betov.free.fr/RosAsm.html >
Betov
> Claiming you write a disassembler for librarylinking to
> cover for piracy is IMO quite a stupid explanation. So either Rene is
> very clever because he really intends piracy and using this argument
> because others might consider it so unbelievable that they will think
> it is true, or he is very stupid to openly advance piracy directly,
> because then he will get into big trouble.
>
I have always said that the first purpose of this
Tool is for _Translation_. In that area, Assembly
Language has a _huge_ advantage on all other ones:
Assembly is the universal nodal of all languages.
So, facing the lack of Asm Demos and the pain the
guys wanting to switch to Asm may have with not
recovering their previous works, all i can say is
that i am rather estonished, that nobody did it
before.
Now, i am bit bored of this demential discussion,
about the legal aspects, suggested by fucky ones
like Hutch and master Pdf, and i will no more
spoil my time with discussing of such a stupidity.
[Please, Gerhard, there are other interresting
things to discuss about, without falling into
Master Pdf usual Tips&Tricks&Traps... Discussing
about the possibility of any legal problem does
nothing else than suggesting that there is really
some possibility of a legal problem. Enough.]
Betov.
Randall Hyde
"Frank Kotler" <fbko...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:BVBRb.170727$na.278291@attbi_s04...
>
> There's a *big* difference between having source code, and having source
> code in RosAsm syntax! I don't know what Betov's got in mind (he might
> not object too strenuously to some "Robin Hood work"), but to me, that's
> the big plus. In the LuxAsm world, for example, we'd be able to
> auto-convert Linux to LuxAsm syntax and start chopping that C cruft out
> of it! :)
Frank,
I don't know how much time you've ever spent with a *good* disassembler
reverse-engineering some code and bringing up to acceptable standards (God
forbid you try this with a *bad* disassembler!), but it's a tremendous
amount
of work. If you've got the source code to the original routines *in just
about
any language*, it's far easier to do the translation by hand than clean up
the
disassembled code. There are only a couple of reasons I can see for using
a disassembler for this purpose:
1. You don't know the HLL in question (though, if you're halfway smart,
you can learn enough of the language to do the translation in less time
that it would take you to clean up the code you're converting).
2. The source code is not available (either lost, or you're disassembling
code
for which source code is not generally available).
I've spent some time disassembling code in the past (over two decades ago,
I once disassembled the Apple II DOS 3.3 operating system and sold
a "disassembled listing" to a bunch of Apple II owners, that's why I can
speak with a little bit of authority concerning the copyright law in this
area - it only took Apple's lawyers about three weeks to send me a
"cease and desist" order and my own lawyer, wisely, told me that I should
give it up; even if I stood a chance of winning in court, I'd lose far more
on court costs than I'd ever make selling the listings). In any case, it is
a *tremendous* amount of work to disassemble code, ensure the
disassembly is correct, comment the code, replace funky labels with
meaningful labels, etc. Then, of course, there's the issues of data
structures.
E.g., a simple statement in C like "sizeof( someStruct )" becomes a
nightmare
when you decompile it. Sure, it will get replaced by the appropriate
constant
that was compiled originally, but what happens when you modify the data
structure at some point down the road? Did you catch all the "hard-coded"
numeric constants that used to be "sizeof(---)" expansions?
Now if the "two-click" disassembly/reassembly is intended simply to produce
the *exact* object code that appeared originally, with no hope for
modification,
then why bother with source code at all? Why not just package up the object
module and include that somehow? (Okay, RosAsm doesn't support that, but
speaking in general.)
"Two-click" disassembly/reassembly is the "holy grail" of the disassembly
crowd. Unfortunately, like the mythical grail, it's never going to be
achieved.
Even if it were perfect, it's still a ton of work to try and use the
disassembler
the way that Rene is suggesting. It's much easier to do the translation
manually.
And in the time that Rene will wind up spending getting his disassembler to
the
point it's as good as IDAPro, he could become an *expert* in *several* HLLs
and do all the translations that he's interested in, and still have time
left over.
Of course, he wouldn't have a wonderful disassembler that's part of his
package,
but he would have a much better set of library routines.
If Rene is *really* interested in doing something to make life easier for
RosAsm
users, he'd drop the disassembler project immediately and get to work on
a MASM->RosAsm translator. Those who want a disassembler could then
use IDAPro and the RosAsmites would have a *great* tool for dealing with
the plethora of other MASM source code out there. Now *that* would be
a much better tool for what Rene's trying to achieve.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde
Randall Hyde
It gets even worse. One of the main reasons for disassembling code is so you
can *modify* it afterwards. Guess what happens to all those "sizeof(
somestruct)"
expansions in the disassembled code? They won't get adjusted to deal with
the
new size of the structure if you decide to change the structure's size
(assuming
you code even extract that information in the first place).
Rene continues to believe that an automatic disassembler is a perfectly
reasonable thing and that he will succeed, even though the concept is
a proven mathematical impossibility (it violates the "halting theorem").
Oh well, it's his time he's wasting. He's been told the real deal by lots of
different people, if he wants to keep tilting at windmills, that's his
business.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde
Betov
$zj7....@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net:
> If Rene is *really* interested in doing something to make life easier for
> RosAsm
> users, he'd drop the disassembler project immediately and
If you'd be *really* interested in doing something for
Assembly, you would drop the HLA bullshit packet and
you would suicide, Master Pdf.
Betov.
Herbert Kleebauer
> Nah, you put TRASH like BetovAsm in the trashbin, especially as it was
> derived from STOLEN commercial software.
Because you are repeating this again and again, I have just
downloaded asm32.zip.
From asm32.txt:
This program is shareware, it may be used for an UNLIMITED period of
evaluation free of charge, by private users only. It is not Freeware and
is not allowed to be used in a commercial or government environment.
If you like it you should register in order to gain all the benefits.
Please tell me, why you think it was illegal to assemble the
fist version of SpAsm with asm32.
The Half A Wannabee
"hutch--" <hu...@movsd.com> wrote in message
news:af910ce4.04012...@posting.google.com...
> > Well i thought i always expressed as clearly as possible
> > that 1) I am going GPL.
>
> Lets seperate the issues here, GPL is a software licencing system to
> share code beween authors and those who would like to work on it to
> improve it, not a cover up for stolen commercial software that has
> been used to ilegally distribute the results. GPL is a legitimate
> system where stealing commercial software is not.
> Regards,
>
> hutch at movsd dot com
Hutch, even if it wore true that the first copy of Spasm wore written with,
such as you claim : "stolen" software, you will still come out looking like
a bit peculiar, when you repeatedly whine all over usenet about something
you cannot prove. And IMHO shouting "MS gonna get you" adds to that. Its
hard to see what you're aiming at. Users do not care about anything but what
feels good to them, and works. I am writing almost a Delphi style like
application in RosAsm now. Instead of using objects, I use chucks of data,
each representing an object, and uses a current pointer for each type.
CurrentWindow, Current"ObjectName" etc. and just points them to the correct
chuck of data or pass them to the code. It works like firecrackers. Want to
see my "main" code :
********************************* code
Main :
call Application_Init
;Create and show the first window
call Application_CreateWindow
call SkinWindow_Show
call Application_Run
call Application_Done
********************************* /code
_*None*_ of it is oop. But it *looks* like oop and it is just as "modular",
when I use the verbose names, in combinations with TITLE. I access the
virtual memory chunks by offset. I name theese offset verbose, like this, in
an equate :
[TSZSkinWindow_Sections 0 ;
.....
TSZSkinWindow_HiddenSections 8 ;
TSZSkinWindow_DropSections 12 ;
TSZSkinWindow_CombinedSectionRgn 16 ;
TSZSkinWindow_WindowHandle 20 ;
TSZSkinWindow_ClientRect 24
TSZSkinWindow_BoundsRect 28
..........
SizeOf_TSZSkinWindow 32 + X,
]
And I access the memory chuck like this ( via edi )
Application_CreateWindow:
......
......
call 'User32.CreateWindowExA' &NULL ClassName AppName,
&WS_POPUP+&WS_THICKFRAME,
100 100 400 500,
&NULL &NULL D$hInstance &NULL
;Save the windowhandle into the current TSZSkinWindow_ structure
mov D$edi + TSZSkinWindow_WindowHandle, eax
.....
....
ret
My code still doesnt use a single macro.....save push / pop.
For thoose who have seen Delphi. It _soon_ becomes _as_ simple. I have
written the bottom code, and this is the _up_. Works like a charm. My
progress have been _faster_ than when I did this with Delphi 3.0 2 years
ago. And I made the code smaller, faster and simpler, cause I see clearer
now, whats going on. And I am still _very_ fresh in assembly. Because of the
source code of RosAsm I can learn from, because of the demos and startlevel
"baseX.exe"s and simple to follow tutorials that gives short and excellent
coding examples to clip in an modify when I need them, access to directX9
headers, the works.
And the multi instruction lines makes it simple too. It goes with what I am
doing - having the whole procedure within a screen view. I _write_ a chunk
of code, as in any assembler. Then the bunch of instructions come to a
*logical* end. So _if_ they fit on a single line, I place them on a single
line, each together makes a statement. That statement becomes easy to
comment. And whats awsome I think, is that it makes the procedure smaller,
and easier to follow.
They compare to Delphi routines in size. The verbose namings might seem like
a pain, but I am used to write verbose from delphi, and it sure makes it
easier to know whats going on, when your read it back later.
I am not claiming RosAsm to be better assembler, I have seen so few, but Im
willing to bet, you must look hard to find one so easy to learn, so capable
in teaching you assembly. So for a beginner I would recommend RosAsm,
instead of some of the other monsters. And I would be completly safe that
once they got used to it they would just laugh at MASM and not even look at
HLA.
Why would they? By then they allready know! Why waste time on HLL like
stuctures and stuff like that. Its not needed ! Doesnt make faster code,
takes more time to study it. Pointeless waste of time. Its more than enough
to learn what you need for the current job, and motivation is much higher
when you need only study whats good to get the current job done, as oposed
to read the whole fucking manual at once, and still not knowing if you need
the crap or not. AoA is bedtime reading. A 2 pund sleeping tablet and a
weapon against burgulars. Hey Beth, why didnt _you_ think about that ?
As Betov states in _RosAsm_ manual, you need mostly a few, maybe 20 asm
memonic, those working horses. The Win32 API have 1000s of procedures, and
Delphi runtime also have 1000s of functions to call. Asm in itself is easy.
You dont sit down tewing the hole intel/masm manual in one run, do you?
The fact is, that even RosAsm is a monster. Its a 2 mega byte monster, and
the manual is also very verbose. But it never *gets in the way*. And its
structured so it doesnt appear to be so flooding you. THAT is what makes
RosAsm so good, it stays simple and managable, even if it lack nothing in
content. It stays clear of hokus pockus.
Betov
news:40177E38...@unibwm.de:
:))
He perfectly knows there is no legal problem, _at_all_.
This is just the usual propaganda good old trick:
"Lie, lie again, lie once more... There will always be
someone for believeing what you say".
:))
Betov.
< http://betov.free.fr/RosAsm.html >
Woody
You really are a complete and utter *!@&*!, aren't you?
Gerhard W. Gruber
<XnF947E8C2944...@213.228.0.138>
>I have always said that the first purpose of this
>Tool is for _Translation_. In that area, Assembly
>Language has a _huge_ advantage on all other ones:
I always understood you that way, because it would be really ridicoulous if
you would believe otherwise.
>Assembly is the universal nodal of all languages.
Yes. :) We agree on that.
>So, facing the lack of Asm Demos and the pain the
>guys wanting to switch to Asm may have with not
>recovering their previous works, all i can say is
>that i am rather estonished, that nobody did it
>before.
It's not really astonishing to me. I learned first a tiny little BASIC (back
in those days :) ) on the C64, but because it was so lacking in speed, and it
couldn't do some of the cool things like really smooth scrolling or rasterline
interrupt and other stuff, I soon learned assembly. Actually by accident,
because I read some BASIC programming book, which had a few lines assembler
included to speed up a certain part. Fortunately the code was so goo
documented, that I immidately understood the mnemonics and how to use them, so
I played around with them and got hooked. From then on I exclusively
programmed in ASM, direclty into memory usualy, without so fancy things like
symbols. Back in those days I knew every address of my computer by its
forename. :) Of course, when I started to learn C I also used assembly to
debug my code and see what it actually was doing and fo course in those days
there were no such things like sourcelevel debugger. This was a great leap
forward, and even after the first compilers were available with sourcelevel
debugging, I still used mainly assembly for debugging (on the Amiga then).
From this I learned quite a lot of how the compiler translates code into ASM,
without ever reading a manual on compiler technology. So with this background
I think it is understandable that I could embrace your approach. But I don't
believe that anybody, who starts learning assembly coming from a HLL first,
will benefit from a disassembler. If he disassembles he previous HLL code into
RosAsm Syntax then he has HLL code in RosAsm syntax. Not really helpfull for a
beginner. If he just translates his exsiting ASM code into RosAsm syntax with
this, then he has gained some speed on the translation process, but because of
some inherent problems with diassembling, I question the usefullnuss of such a
code.
As I already stated: Even if you disassembler will work perfectly, and could
disassmble each and every piece of executable or DLL or library, you throw at
it, and it could determine what is code and what is data, there is still an
inherent flaw with this. You can NOT disassemble equates, which will make the
listing readable and usable for a human reader, not to mention maintainable.
AND you can NOT disassemble structures properly. It doesn't matter wether you
support structures by syntax or not. Even if you consider a structure simply
as a set of equates with specifying the offset for each field (basically a
structure does just this) then you can NOT determine this structure by
disassembling.
>[Please, Gerhard, there are other interresting
>things to discuss about, without falling into
>Master Pdf usual Tips&Tricks&Traps... Discussing
>about the possibility of any legal problem does
>nothing else than suggesting that there is really
>some possibility of a legal problem. Enough.]
Well. I don't mind. I don't buy this that you intend to do this just for
enhancing piracy anyway, so there is no point in discussin this particular
point endlessly. :)
Gerhard W. Gruber
<rand...@earthlink.net> in alt.lang.asm with
<GOFRb.30418$zj7....@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net>
>I don't know how much time you've ever spent with a *good* disassembler
>reverse-engineering some code and bringing up to acceptable standards (God
>forbid you try this with a *bad* disassembler!), but it's a tremendous
>amount of work. If you've got the source code to the original routines *in just
My main purpose of using ASM is for reverse engineering, though I usually
don't do it that far to get a assemblying sourcecode from it, but even if you
just try to find something particular, extract a function or similar stuff is
quite a lot of work. I did some reverse engineering on the Amiga back then,
because the official documentation was so wrong on some points that it was
unusable and the only way was to reverse engineer and document the library we
needed. But this takes still quite a lot of time and of course in this case yo
have the advantage of having a documention, which, even when wrong, gives you
a rough idea what a particular code is supposed to do. :)
>"Two-click" disassembly/reassembly is the "holy grail" of the disassembly
>crowd. Unfortunately, like the mythical grail, it's never going to be
>achieved.
>Even if it were perfect, it's still a ton of work to try and use the
>disassembler the way that Rene is suggesting. It's much easier to do the translation
>manually.
As I said in my other post, even if the disassembling process is perfect,
there is an inherent flaw which will prevent the creation of a usefull
sourcecode, for almost all non-trivial and interesting pieces of code.
Espeicially if the intention is to reuse that source then for your own
purposes.
>If Rene is *really* interested in doing something to make life easier for
>RosAsm users, he'd drop the disassembler project immediately and get to work on
He would implement proper library support. :)
>a MASM->RosAsm translator. Those who want a disassembler could then
It shouldn't be that hard to write a MASM translator with lexx & yacc if you
are bent on it. Of course this violates the "Holy Assembly" approach. :)
Gerhard W. Gruber
<rand...@earthlink.net> in alt.lang.asm with
<PRFRb.30425$zj7....@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net>
>Rene continues to believe that an automatic disassembler is a perfectly
>reasonable thing and that he will succeed, even though the concept is
>a proven mathematical impossibility (it violates the "halting theorem").
I know why it is impossible. One point you already mentioned are these, after
compilation, hard coded sizeof() statements. Of course all the other equates
suffer from the same problem.
A code which will look like this:
#define ER_NO_ACCESS 1
#define ER_FILE_NOT_FOUND 2
...
#define MENU_LOAD_FILE 1
#define MENU_SAVE_AS 2
SaveFile()
{
int rc = 0;
if(item == MENU_SAVE_AS)
{
if((open() == -1)
{
rc = ER_FILE_NOT_FOUND;
goto Quit;
}
}
...
return rc;
}
Will translate to something like this:
_SomeLabel:
mov _val1,0
cmp _val2,2
jne _LocalLabel1
call _somefunction
cmp eax, -1
jne _LocalLabel1
mov _val1, 2
jmp _LocalLabel1
...
_LocalLabel1:
mov eax, _val1
ret
A disassembler can NEVER determine what 2 originally was and the programmer
has to decide if the two 2s are the same 2 or different ones, by analyzing the
logic behind it. Just from looking at the code, you simply can not determine
what the values mean or how to relate to each other, if they relate at all.
I don't think that the "Halting Problem" is really a proof for a disassembler.
Of course, with self modifying code this would be a problem, but lets assume
that the majority of potentially to be disassembled code will just be
compilergenerated, which means that you could IN THEORY successfully determine
all code and data objects.
Of course compilers generate dynamic code like using jump tables via
registers, which means that a moderate successfull disassembler will have to
have an idea what a register is currently used for to recognize such things.
Table:
ADDR Fkt1
ADDR Fkt2
ADDR Fkt3
Value: dw xxx
Like:
mov eax, OFFSET Table
shl ecx, 2
mov edx, [eax+ecx]
jmp edx
In this example, I wonder how the disassembler, supposing that he recognices
the table successfully, will determine how many entries of the table are
really jump addresses and where normal data continues (like Value which is no
part of the Table anymore).
If the disassembler doesn't recognize such a usage, then code which is
activated ONLY by the table will never be recogniced as code and will falsly
end up as data in the final disassembly. I guess there are more complicated
examples then these simple ones.
I could think that another thing which might confuse diassembler and hide the
code (I have to test this with IDA Pro).
push offset LowFkt
push offset HighFkt
ret
Actually it's quite interesting to think about such problems of a decompiler
and how this could be solved. :)
hutch--
> > From asm32.txt:
> >
> > This program is shareware, it may be used for an UNLIMITED period of
> > evaluation free of charge, by private users only. It is not Freeware
> > and is not allowed to be used in a commercial or government
> > environment. If you like it you should register in order to gain all
> > the benefits.
> >
> > Please tell me, why you think it was illegal to assemble the
> > fist version of SpAsm with asm32.
Simple, you did not pay for it and instead of using the software for
an UNLIMITED period of evaluation, you wrote your own assembler with
it and distributed it. Your assembler is a direct derivative of the
ASM32 assembler and as you have abused the evaluation by distributing
the derivation of that software, you software is illegal and anyone
who uses it is taking a risk of wasting their time developing in an
illegal product.
Now come clean Betov, you are just a shonky little crook mouthing
endless bullsh*t to cover up what you really are, a THIEF !!!!!!!!!
Betov
> As I already stated: Even if you disassembler will work perfectly, and
> could disassmble each and every piece of executable or DLL or library,
> you throw at it, and it could determine what is code and what is data,
> there is still an inherent flaw with this. You can NOT disassemble
> equates, which will make the listing readable and usable for a human
> reader, not to mention maintainable. AND you can NOT disassemble
> structures properly. It doesn't matter wether you support structures
> by syntax or not. Even if you consider a structure simply as a set of
> equates with specifying the offset for each field (basically a
> structure does just this) then you can NOT determine this structure by
> disassembling.
>
User defined Equates and user defined Structures,
yes, i agrea. Impossible (not considering the final
possibility of extracting them from the original
Source - if available-).
But for OS Equates and OS Structures _yes_ there
is a possibility. Exactely the same as the one you
can actually see effective for Api calls Parameters
Names substitutions.
Of course there will always be failures cases. My
approach with failures cases, in all of this, is
that better is having something than nothing, and
that what we already have is already interresting. :)
Actually, a Maintainer is working at collecting all
we need for this. This demential work will result in
a free documentation file, with crossed references
between the OS Functions, Equates, and Structures
(See the Doc Project, on RosAsm Pages).
Once this Files will be available (as a side Help
File), the Disassembler will reuse it as a Data Base,
for performing the symbolic analyses and substitutions
(Not for tomorrow morning... ;)
Betov.
Betov
> I know why it is impossible
I hope that every knows this Gerhard. There
is zero problem with failures cases. Or, at
least, should i say, i am not interrested with
what does not work. I am interrested with what
works.
Of course, Master Pdf will _only_ see what does
_not_ work. Evident. But,... his problem only.
Not mine.
Betov.
Gerhard W. Gruber
with <af910ce4.04012...@posting.google.com>
>Simple, you did not pay for it and instead of using the software for
>an UNLIMITED period of evaluation, you wrote your own assembler with
>it and distributed it. Your assembler is a direct derivative of the
>ASM32 assembler and as you have abused the evaluation by distributing
>the derivation of that software, you software is illegal and anyone
>who uses it is taking a risk of wasting their time developing in an
>illegal product.
LOL. If that is your argument, it would blow you out of a court faster then
you could get in. :)
So with the same logic, when sombody is writing a compiler, using Visual
Studio for development, then he is guilty of copyright infringment because the
new compiler is also a derivative of the original compiler? What an absurd
argument, but at least it gives a good laugh. :))
>Now come clean Betov, you are just a shonky little crook mouthing
>endless bullsh*t to cover up what you really are, a THIEF !!!!!!!!!
I thought that Betov might have stolen the sourcecode from somebody and
building upon it. At least that was what I had to assume from reading your
posts. But if he simply used a free assembler to develop his own assembler,
which is not even commercial, then I fail to see whats your problem is.
And if he continues to use his OWN assembler now to work on his assembler,
then there is no legal issue anywhere.
hutch--
===========================================================================
LOL. If that is your argument, it would blow you out of a court faster
then
you could get in. :)
So with the same logic, when sombody is writing a compiler, using
Visual
Studio for development, then he is guilty of copyright infringment
because the
new compiler is also a derivative of the original compiler? What an
absurd
argument, but at least it gives a good laugh. :))
===========================================================================
What you seem to have missed is the ownership issue and the rights of
use from the owner. If you own Visual Studio, you can write what you
like with it and this is the same as the assembler that Betov used to
write his original assembler with. I know that some people think that
all software should not only be free but think that it is free but
there is a legitimate description for this view, its called "software
piracy". The problem with your view of what constitutes "the same
logic" is that its different logic, one position OWNS the software,
the other STOLE it.
Still you may find a court in Afghanistan or Botswanaland or perhaps
with the penguins in Antarctica who would see you view as correct but
they probably don't know what a computer is yet. :)
Wannabee,
> Hutch, even if it wore true that the first copy of Spasm wore written with,
> such as you claim : "stolen" software, you will still come out looking like
> a bit peculiar, when you repeatedly whine all over usenet about something
> you cannot prove.
I don't have to prove it, Betov has already admitted he wrote his
assembler with someone elses software and he did not pay for it. With
matters of ownership, neither your opinion or his matter, he did not
own the software and he distributed a derivation of the software he
did not pay for outside of the licence agreement to use it for
evaluation. Thats called software piracy.
> And IMHO shouting "MS gonna get you" adds to that.
As far as I know Microsoft don't own the assembler that Betov ripped
off so I seriously doubt they would bother. You seem to have confused
a number of issues here about who owned what.
If in fact you can get OOP(S) going in BetovAsm, good luck to you but
it does not solve the issue of the software being a derivative of
STOLEN software. This matter would never have been raised except that
Betov will never shut his mouth and as he has tried to raise licencing
issues on many occasions, his own theft of someone elses software will
be shoved in his face every time he opens his mouth because the bottom
line is he STOLE someone elses software and is trying to brazen it
out.
The Half A Wannabee
>
> I don't have to prove it, Betov has already admitted he wrote his
> assembler with someone elses software and he did not pay for it. With
> matters of ownership, neither your opinion or his matter, he did not
> own the software and he distributed a derivation of the software he
> did not pay for outside of the licence agreement to use it for
> evaluation. Thats called software piracy.
You cannot base a case on something a man *said* For all you know he is
pulling your leg, and has paid for it. Furthermore. The day he did pay for
it, or does, is the day your whining about it becomes even more peculiar.
Remeber that RosAsm is not completed. And its free. So its neither commerial
nor fully evaluated. So there is absolutely no stealing involved whatsoever.
And no getting rich from other peoples work. Your case is so leaky I refer
you to reread Grubers post, until you understand it.
PS : I dont write OOP. I write -non encapsulated-, non-inheritable-, flat
or perhaps even random access code, that have the same ease of reading and
only _appear from a distance_ to be structured as if it wore oop. Its
slimmed down considerably and flattened to do the Spesfic job of porting my
Delphi stuff to RosAsm. And yesterday my thoughts about how to do the port
resolved themselfes and the project proved itself to be _as_ easy to do in
RosAsm. The real problem is not comming from RosAsm at all. Most of the
problems comes from (as usual ) dealing with the OS. RosAsm performs its
part of the job more than well enough for my requirements. I am frankly
amazed that it would be this easy. I jumped and shouted when I saw how easy
I could implement my framework in RosAsm ! And I would never have thought I
could have done it as quickly if it wore not for RosAsm. Its author is the
only man I knew who told me asm could be easy, and proved it. RosAsm has
more functionality than I will ever need. Randall tells you that asm is
difficult. Maybe they are both telling the truth !!!!
Herbert Kleebauer
> > > From asm32.txt:
> > >
> > > This program is shareware, it may be used for an UNLIMITED period of
> > > evaluation free of charge, by private users only. It is not Freeware
> > > and is not allowed to be used in a commercial or government
> > > environment. If you like it you should register in order to gain all
> > > the benefits.
> > >
> > > Please tell me, why you think it was illegal to assemble the
> > > fist version of SpAsm with asm32.
>
> Simple, you did not pay for it and instead of using the software for
> an UNLIMITED period of evaluation, you wrote your own assembler with
> it and distributed it. Your assembler is a direct derivative of the
> ASM32 assembler and as you have abused the evaluation by distributing
> the derivation of that software, you software is illegal and anyone
> who uses it is taking a risk of wasting their time developing in an
> illegal product.
Don't you think you make a fool of yourself? Wouldn't it be the time
to apologise to Betov. I will try to get a statement of Intelligent
Firmware Ltd. that there was no infringement of their user licence,
if you promise, that you then make a public apologise to Betov.
Betov
@posting.google.com:
> I don't have to prove it, Betov has already admitted he wrote his
> assembler with someone elses software and he did not pay for it.
Hi, small head! In case you would not know, i first
wrote a 16 Bits version of SpAsm with ... A86,... that
i did not payed either (because i do not see any reason
for supporting ShareWare, neither for A86 nor for Asm32
Demo version).
One year ago, or so, when trying to define the Mnemonics
for the new Branch Predictions OpCodes, with NASM devs,
GoAsm Author, and me, Eric Isaacson (Author of A86) had
zero problem with providing me with precious informations
and judicious explanations on these new instructions.
But, if it may really please you, you can also say that
i wrote RosAsm with _TWO_ Stolen SoftWares. :)) :)) :))
(And, also, in such Posts, you should never forget to
recall that "that MicroSoft EULA frees the users from the
oppresion of the Virus-Like inheritable GPL. I really
love that one ;)
The great thing with all of this is that you seem be become
more dement each day. At the end, i will no more have to
even take any care of kicking you out, as it seems you are
soon going to be able to kick into your own ass without
any external help. :))
Betov.
Gerhard W. Gruber
with <af910ce4.04012...@posting.google.com>
>piracy". The problem with your view of what constitutes "the same
>logic" is that its different logic, one position OWNS the software,
>the other STOLE it.
If it is a free software, as in free to use for non-commercial purposes, then
how did he stole it by using it to write his own assembler? Unless you mean he
tried his assembler to be a commercial product?
>I don't have to prove it, Betov has already admitted he wrote his
>assembler with someone elses software and he did not pay for it. With
Why would he pay for it if it is free to use?
>matters of ownership, neither your opinion or his matter, he did not
>own the software and he distributed a derivation of the software he
When you write an assembler with it, this doesn't make it automatically a
derivative work. Unless he used the sourceode of the assmbler and built up his
own assembler BASED on that source.
Roy Jones
along with my original email.
--- Michael Krech <mkr...@intelligentfirm.co.uk> wrote:
> No problem at all, Roy! Go ahead and use it as much
> as you want :)
> ASM32/CPL32 is not a money making project for us, we
> are using it ourselves in our x86 asm projects.
> Anyway, any company who would use ASM32 , wouldn't
> have a problem paying a "piece of bread" :) to get CPL32 and support
>
> Kind Regards,
> Michael Krech
>
-- Roy Jones wrote
> > From your website I understand that your firm allows ASM32 to be used
> > for an unlimited time for evaluation by private users. I also
> understand
> > that the primary purpose of releasing ASM32 as shareware is to promote
> > its superset assembler CPL32. My question is regarding what your
> firm's > position on private users using ASM32 non-commercially, either
> for > studying assembly language programming or writing small > open
> source/GPL/freeware programs.
> >
> >Thank you for your time.
> >
> >Roy
>
Betov
news:opr2jvze...@news.la.sbcglobal.net:
Too bad.
Hutch-- (--, --, --, --, --, ...)
:)) :)) :))
< http://betov.free.fr/RosAsm.html >
hutch--
> If it is a free software, as in free to use for non-commercial purposes, then
> how did he stole it by using it to write his own assembler? Unless you mean he
> tried his assembler to be a commercial product?
What you are doing here is reinterpreting the licence that Betov
posted. It allowed unlimited evaluation for personal use, not
distribution of code written using it by derivation. The bottom line
is he used it outside of the allowed licence to write his own
assembler which ended up being able to build itself and then
distributed the derivation.
> Why would he pay for it if it is free to use?
Free to use but not free to distribute and since Betov was too lousy
to pay for someone elses work, he STOLE it instead and distributed the
derivation of code he wrote in it.
> When you write an assembler with it, this doesn't make it automatically a
> derivative work. Unless he used the sourceode of the assmbler and built up his
> own assembler BASED on that source.
The problem is Betov wrote his assembler with someone elses software
without paying for it and produced a distributable result from that
software so anything that follows from the original work written
illegally in evaluation software is a derivation of that software.
No-one would care about what Betov did but it is Betov who has for
years attacked other peoples work, the licencing, design and otherwise
so Betov will keep hearing about his own THEFT of commercial software
until he shuts up.
The Half A Wannabee
>
> > If it is a free software, as in free to use for non-commercial purposes,
then
> > how did he stole it by using it to write his own assembler? Unless you
mean he
> > tried his assembler to be a commercial product?
>
> What you are doing here is reinterpreting the licence that Betov
> posted. It allowed unlimited evaluation for personal use, not
> distribution of code written using it by derivation. The bottom line
> is he used it outside of the allowed licence to write his own
> assembler which ended up being able to build itself and then
> distributed the derivation.
I can see the green on your face. :-) . LOL.
> Free to use but not free to distribute and since Betov was too lousy
> to pay for someone elses work, he STOLE it instead and distributed the
> derivation of code he wrote in it.
> The problem is Betov wrote his assembler with someone elses software
> without paying for it and produced a distributable result from that
> software so anything that follows from the original work written
> illegally in evaluation software is a derivation of that software.
> No-one would care about what Betov did but it is Betov who has for
> years attacked other peoples work, the licencing, design and otherwise
> so Betov will keep hearing about his own THEFT of commercial software
> until he shuts up.
Dr. Bee recommend getting laid. Anything will do.
Frank Kotler
> What you are doing here is reinterpreting the licence that Betov
> posted. It allowed unlimited evaluation for personal use, not
> distribution of code written using it by derivation. The bottom line
> is he used it outside of the allowed licence to write his own
> assembler which ended up being able to build itself and then
> distributed the derivation.
What's your definition of "derivative work"? If I write an assembler
using your MASM32 package, is my assembler a "derivative" of Masm?
Best,
Frank
Robert Redelmeier
> What's your definition of "derivative work"? If I write an assembler
> using your MASM32 package, is my assembler a "derivative" of Masm?
hutch can speak for himself. But I'd bet that SCO would
claim it's a derivative work!
The MASM licence should make this very clear, and ought to
be read before starting any project.
-- Robert
Frank Kotler
> The MASM licence should make this very clear, and ought to
> be read before starting any project.
I shall be sure to do that before starting any project using Masm :)
Best,
Frank
P.S. Do I remember rightly... Was it your son who was contemplating
learning assembly? How'd that go?
Robert Redelmeier
> P.S. Do I remember rightly... Was it your son who was contemplating
> learning assembly? How'd that go?
Yes, it was. He's busy with other things right now, but will
probably come back to it. I've learned not to push.
-- Robert
>
>
Gerhard W. Gruber
with <af910ce4.04012...@posting.google.com>
>What you are doing here is reinterpreting the licence that Betov
>posted. It allowed unlimited evaluation for personal use, not
>distribution of code written using it by derivation. The bottom line
>is he used it outside of the allowed licence to write his own
>assembler which ended up being able to build itself and then
>distributed the derivation.
This is NOT a derivation. It MAY be a breach of licence that he distributed
this assembler, but then again, the licence is only explicit about COMMERCIAL
usage, which Rene is not.
>Free to use but not free to distribute and since Betov was too lousy
>to pay for someone elses work, he STOLE it instead and distributed the
>derivation of code he wrote in it.
That may not be nice. I tend to pay for some software if I find it usefull and
meets other criteria. But it is not strictly required by the licence so this
is no theft.
>The problem is Betov wrote his assembler with someone elses software
>without paying for it and produced a distributable result from that
>software so anything that follows from the original work written
>illegally in evaluation software is a derivation of that software.
No. A derivation is when he would have used the sourcode of the original
program and built upon it thus DERIVING from it. Writing some program with it
is NOT derivative. Just because it happens he wrote an assembler doesn't make
it derivative.
Gerhard W. Gruber
alt.lang.asm with <sjiSb.184606$na.304508@attbi_s04>
>What's your definition of "derivative work"? If I write an assembler
>using your MASM32 package, is my assembler a "derivative" of Masm?
Hutch seems to be of this opinion, but that is simply wrong. In that case many
commercial code, built with GPL tools wouldn't be commercial because the GPL
requires you to put derivative works also under GPL.
Matter of fact is that this definition of derivation is simply wrong.
hutch--
> What's your definition of "derivative work"? If I write an assembler
> using your MASM32 package, is my assembler a "derivative" of Masm?
Yes. The difference is that you have the legal right to write whatever
you like and distribute what you write without payment or royalties.
When Betov used an assembler that was licenced for unlimited
evaluation and then distributed its derived work, he STOLE the
software as he was not licenced to distribute the derivation of that
work.
Its like if you obtained a hot copy of Visual Basic or Delphi or VC
.NET or whatever and wrote software with it that ended up reproducing
itself, it would still be a derivation of the original.
I normally would not give a stuff about what Betov does but this is a
debate that he has wanted to continue for years and it is Betov who
introduced the licencing issue.
hutch--
> I can see the green on your face. :-) . LOL.
Smile, the profundity is truly underwhelming. About the only "green"
thing I have continued to see in this debate is the level of envy
Betov suffers about Randy Hyde's reputation and success.
> Dr. Bee recommend getting laid. Anything will do.
The good doctor is a little late on that one by about half a lifetime
and I never had to suffer "anything", perhaps you are telegraphing
your own situation. :)
This debate is one that Betov has wanted to continue and I guess those
who support him support his mouth as well so they may make interesting
bed fellows.
The Half A Wannabee
> Wannabee,
>
> > I can see the green on your face. :-) . LOL.
>
> Smile, the profundity is truly underwhelming. About the only "green"
> thing I have continued to see in this debate is the level of envy
> Betov suffers about Randy Hyde's reputation and success.
Envy? Dont you know your own language? Its not envy. Its frustation, from
seeing that its impossible to get socalled intelligent and educated people
to see simple facts that a child would be able to see.
> > Dr. Bee recommend getting laid. Anything will do.
>
> The good doctor is a little late on that one by about half a lifetime
> and I never had to suffer "anything", perhaps you are telegraphing
> your own situation. :)
So that you would have more to whine about :- ) ?
>
> This debate is one that Betov has wanted to continue and I guess those
> who support him support his mouth as well so they may make interesting
> bed fellows.
This is maybe the mark of you reading inability? If you want to know who is
posting and who is working, do a search for number of Randall Hyde's post
and then Betovs post. You can do the math! Betov calls Hyde a master, but
the truth is the complete oposite.
About your own posts. You seem to make only one claim. That RosAsm is
created with a stolen tool. For XX posts this is about your only claim. And,
needless to say, you could even make that hold water.
Retards,
the Wannabee
hutch--
What you are confusing here is conditions of a GPL licence and
commercial rights of the software owner. The sequence in Betov's case
is,
1. He wrote his original assembler in software he did not pay for.
2. He DERIVED his next version of the assembler from software he wrote
in an assembler he did not pay for.
3. He distributed the derivation of the original software he did not
pay for.
Now what Betov needs is a way to break the chain of derivation from
software that he did not pay for because the software licence only
allowed evaluation, not distribution. The problem is he has no rights
of distribution with the software he derived from the original and
that remains his problem.
The precedent he is looking for is the capacity to produce programming
tools in STOLEN software and legitimise it AFTER he writes the tool in
stolen software by rebuilding it in the software he wrote in STOLEN
software. The problem still remains the same, he did not pay for the
original software and what he has writen in it cannot be distributed,
derivation from his own first work in the original assembler or not.
As I have stated before, it is Betov who wanted this debate and it was
Betov who continued to raise the licencing issue, that is why the
problems of his own theft of someone elses software will continue to
come back and haunt him until he shuts his mouth.
Betov
@posting.google.com:
> Gerhard,
>
> What you are confusing here is conditions of a GPL licence and
> commercial rights of the software owner. The sequence in Betov's case
> is,
>
> 1. He wrote his original assembler in software he did not pay for.
>
> 2. He DERIVED his next version of the assembler from software he wrote
> in an assembler he did not pay for.
>
> 3. He distributed the derivation of the original software he did not
> pay for.
>
>
Oh! Yeah!... and you forget:
1) The Two-Click-Disassembler-Reassembler is a Piracy
Tool that should be condamned.
2) The GPL is a Virus, and MicroSoft Eula saves users
from the GPL oppression, and so forth, makes them free
in a free world.
3) MASM is a Powerfull Assembler.
4) Hutch-- is at the origin of the Assembly Rebirth and
has hopefully saved the Assembly Programmers community
from TASM, that was a Tool for writing... Viruses.
5) Betov is unethical because he writes a GPLed Assembler
_for_ Windows (and ReactOS will never exist).
... and so on.
No answer to the the fellow who published, up there, the
answer from the maintainer of ASM32??... :)) :)) :))
Betov.
< http://betov.free.fr/RosAsm.html >
Robert Redelmeier
> When Betov used an assembler that was licenced for unlimited
> evaluation and then distributed its derived work, he STOLE the
> software as he was not licenced to distribute the derivation
> of that work.
Well, Betov may or may not have violtated the MASM licence, depending
on whether non-commercial distribution is included in "unlimited
evaluation".
More interesting is the question of whether a pgm written in a
computer language is automatically a derivative of that language.
Cogent arguments can be made both ways, and I do not believe
the matter has been settled in court.
For derivative status: The pgm is useless and without meaning
in the absence of the compiler and it's concepts/constructs.
Often, code directly from the compilers libraries is included
in the final executable, or required to be present at runtime.
(The LGPL addresses this concern).
Against derivative status: Computer languages and their
compilers are created specifically to entice people into
creating works in them. Granting derivative status smacks
of entrapment and could be equitably estopped.
Speech and writings do not appear to be derivative works of the
human language used. The question is not silly. Esperanto
(created 1887 by LL Zamenhof (d1917) is very heavily used by
the UN. It is probably covered by copyright, but does the
UN owe royalties to his estate?
Furthermore, copyright has a little-explored minimum size.
You cannot copyright individual words (you might be able to
trademark them). Webster's cannot claim derivative status
when a novelist uses it's dictionary in writing her novel.
A computer pgmr might make the same claim -- the mneumonics and
constructions used are too short to be copyrighted themselves,
so are free for use.
-- Robert
Gerhard W. Gruber
with <af910ce4.04013...@posting.google.com>
>Its like if you obtained a hot copy of Visual Basic or Delphi or VC
>.NET or whatever and wrote software with it that ended up reproducing
>itself, it would still be a derivation of the original.
Seems you are confused about the word "itself" here. When you write a Compiler
with Visual C then this is not reproducing "itself". This is just another
compiler. If you make the new compiler in such a way that it mimicks all
behaviour from Visual C, down to the last error, then it STILL is not
reproducing "itself". Of course "reproducing itself" is quite meaningless in
that context anyway, because Visual C was never designed to reproduce itself,
so you can code whatever you like and it will never reproduce itself.
On the other hand, if you grab the sourcecode of, let's say, KDE which is
under GPL, and you change some lines of code, creating a new X GUI frontend,
no matter how different it looks, this IS derivative work and IF you put this
under a commercial licence, and not put it under GPL, THEN you would be
stealing the software.
Derivative means kind of like evolution in nature. Your child is a derivative
from you, but the child of your neighbour is NOT a derivative from you, even
if the neighbour used your wife to produce the child. So to speak. :)
Gerhard W. Gruber
<red...@ev1.net.invalid> in alt.lang.asm with
<oXtSb.12459$Kg3....@newssvr23.news.prodigy.com>
>More interesting is the question of whether a pgm written in a
>computer language is automatically a derivative of that language.
It is not. It can not be, as long as you write it completely yourself. If this
were not so, then BSD would had have a hard time, when they reworte their
code. Also a blackbox technique to recreate copyrighted material would also
not be possible.
>Cogent arguments can be made both ways, and I do not believe
>the matter has been settled in court.
It is.
>For derivative status: The pgm is useless and without meaning
>in the absence of the compiler and it's concepts/constructs.
>Often, code directly from the compilers libraries is included
>in the final executable, or required to be present at runtime.
>(The LGPL addresses this concern).
This is, in the strictest sense, a derived work, because it incorporates
actual code from the library. On the other hand if you write the complete
library yourself, which you can easily do with C, then it is NOT a derived
work and the L/GPL is not an issue. That's exactly why the LGPL covers usually
libraries. If creating the same program which is used to create the program
would be a derivative work, then gcc must also be LGPL, because if it is only
GPL, then EACH and EVERY program, ever compiled with gcc would be GPL, which
certainly is NOT the case.
Gerhard W. Gruber
with <af910ce4.04013...@posting.google.com>
>1. He wrote his original assembler in software he did not pay for.
That may be.
>2. He DERIVED his next version of the assembler from software he wrote
>in an assembler he did not pay for.
Can you recount the exact steps what he did?
As I understood it:
He was using an assembler which had a licence, which is free for evulation for
an unlimited time. You are not allowed to write commercial software with it,
but you may use it for private purposes.
Since the evaluation is an unlimited time, Rene is free to write whatever he
chooses with it, until he is satisifed and either dumps the product or chooses
to buy it.
Personally a licence statement saying "allowed for evulation for an unlimited
time" is strictly nonsense. An evaluation period is ALWAYS for a limited time,
so what the author probably meant was that it is free for personal use, but
not for commercial. If the author meant that it is free for a limited time,
then why didn't he write so? So this suggests to me that he doesn't care about
private use and tha mail, which was posted here today, about asking the
Author, supports my assumption.
So Rene was writing this assembler, which he never sold (or did he?), and when
he was finished in such a state, that he became usable, he used it to write
the next version of his own assembler, right?
Of course it may be objectionable to use a tool, which is free for evalution,
in such a way that you not pay for it, when you find it usefully enough to do
something usefull with it. After using WindowsCommander for some time, I
decided to buy it. Not because I had to (then again legaly I may had to) but
because I found it usefull and use it all the time. If I wouldn't have found
it usefull, I would have dropped it, or at least waited until I found
something better.
A clever laywer could of course claim, that writing an entire working
assembler is no longer evaluation, because ven halfway through, you would
already have determined if the tool is usefully for you or not. On the other
hand, you can defend yourself that there is no timelimit on it, and you never
know wether the tool stands up to such a big project like an entire assembler
is. Given the fact that the author doesn't care for personal use, I doubt that
you can win on this basis.
>3. He distributed the derivation of the original software he did not
>pay for.
It was not a derivation!!!
>Now what Betov needs is a way to break the chain of derivation from
>software that he did not pay for because the software licence only
>allowed evaluation, not distribution. The problem is he has no rights
Where does it say this? AFAIK it only said that you may not distribute
commercialy.
>The precedent he is looking for is the capacity to produce programming
>tools in STOLEN software and legitimise it AFTER he writes the tool in
>stolen software by rebuilding it in the software he wrote in STOLEN
That's perfectly legal. :) If he would go to court for abusing the licence, he
could only be sued for what he did with the original software. He couldn't be
sued for what he did with the program that he wrote himself, even when the
original software would have been stolen. Since it is not a derivative work,
which it could be ONLY when he would have the source for it, which I assume he
has not, there is no problem with that part.
Robert Redelmeier
> It is not. It can not be, as long as you write it completely yourself.
Ah, but you cannot write a pgm without some reference to the
compiler manual, or other books. Or did you learn `rep movsd`
on your mother's knee? :)
> If this were not so, then BSD would had have a hard time,
> when they reworte their code.
IIRC, they _did_ have a hard time with AT&T. The monopoly
status of the latter undoubtedly helped them prevail.
The delay allowed Linux to leapfrog.
> Also a blackbox technique to recreate copyrighted material
> would also not be possible.
The Chinese Wall technique certainly _is_ possible.
You cannot copyright ideas, only their concrete expression.
Patents cover ideas.
>>the matter has been settled in court.
> It is.
Excellent. Do you have a case reference?
> then EACH and EVERY program, ever compiled with gcc would be GPL,
> which certainly is NOT the case.
Agreed, because the `c` language itself is more-or-less
public domain. Copyright is asserted over compliers, books
and standards, but not over the language itself. Perhaps it
is too close to ideas and too far from their expression to
be copyrightable.
-- Robert
>
Gerhard W. Gruber
<red...@ev1.net.invalid> in alt.lang.asm with
<kewSb.1142$Gw1.24...@newssvr11.news.prodigy.com>
>Ah, but you cannot write a pgm without some reference to the
>compiler manual, or other books. Or did you learn `rep movsd`
>on your mother's knee? :)
You wont believe it, but I did. :)
>IIRC, they _did_ have a hard time with AT&T. The monopoly
>status of the latter undoubtedly helped them prevail.
>The delay allowed Linux to leapfrog.
Yes. But now they are legaly in the clear because of that. They wouldn't be
clear if this would still be an issue, because it wouldn't be possible to
solve it, with that definition.
>>>the matter has been settled in court.
>> It is.
>
>Excellent. Do you have a case reference?
BSD. :)
>Agreed, because the `c` language itself is more-or-less
>public domain. Copyright is asserted over compliers, books
>and standards, but not over the language itself. Perhaps it
>is too close to ideas and too far from their expression to
>be copyrightable.
Well, we may get this, if softwarepatents would be ever allowed. I really hope
that this will never be the case in Europe.
Betov
$Kg3....@newssvr23.news.prodigy.com:
> hutch-- <hu...@movsd.com> wrote:
>> When Betov used an assembler that was licenced for unlimited
>> evaluation and then distributed its derived work, he STOLE the
>> software as he was not licenced to distribute the derivation
>> of that work.
>
> Well, Betov may or may not have violtated the MASM licence, depending
> on whether non-commercial distribution is included in "unlimited
> evaluation".
>
Not "MASM" Robert (shame on me!!!... ;)...
"A86" and "ASM32". Two free versions of Sharewares.
You can be 100% sure that if i had have no other
choice but MASM, i would never had written anything
at all. :))
Betov.
Roy Jones
I sent an email 2 days ago to Intelligent Firmware. Below is their
Gerhard W. Gruber
alt.lang.asm with <opr2lqbl...@news.la.sbcglobal.net>
>In case anyone missed it yesterday :)
I haven't missed it. :)
>> No problem at all, Roy! Go ahead and use it as much
>> as you want :)
>> ASM32/CPL32 is not a money making project for us, we
>> are using it ourselves in our x86 asm projects.
>> Anyway, any company who would use ASM32 , wouldn't
>> have a problem paying a "piece of bread" :) to get CPL32 and support
Which fits perfectly my assumption on why the author wrote the licence in such
a clumsy way. Simply because he doesn't mind as long as there is no commercial
distribution involved.
hutch--
> Not "MASM" Robert (shame on me!!!... ;)...
>
> "A86" and "ASM32". Two free versions of Sharewares.
ASM32 free for evaluation, not distribution you shonky little crook.
>
> You can be 100% sure that if i had have no other
> choice but MASM, i would never had written anything
> at all. :))
This is where you lost the plot a LONG time ago. If you really wanted
to get revenge on that Wicked Satanic Spawn Microsoft, you would have
coded BetovSpazm in MASM and then improved on it as MASM had the grunt
to start with. The difference is that MASM was licenced for you to do
exactly that where the software you STOLE was not.
Instead of the crippleware style of assembler you inherited from the
rhetoric surrounding the assembler you STOLE, you could have started
with the REAL THING and actually got somewhere instead of sprouting
bullsh*t to cover up the failures in your code design.
hutch--
> Can you recount the exact steps what he did?
I actually don't need to here as he has admited he used the assembler
to write his own. In the software world, you don't get anything out of
nothing, you must write the software and get it to work.
What the argument entails for Betov to be able to produce a
distributable tool from evaluation software is that you can start with
STOLEN software and subsequently legitimise it by
recompiling/assembling the results. It may be a convenient pipe dream
from Betov but this "right" is not contained in the licence.
The sense of "evaluation" is in fact very well understood in the
software area and means something as simple as EVALUATE, not PRODUCE.
While Betov did in fact evaluate the software long enough to be able
to use it, he also produced software with it and subsequently
distributed the derivation of the work he first wrote in that
software.
Now instead of doing the right thing and actually paying for the
software that he had successfully evaluated, he distributed the
derivation of what he wrote in it. This makes Betov a software pirate
who has continued to try and cover up that he STOLE the software that
he first produced BetovSpazm with.
Now the humerous part is the toy he first wrote his own stuff in would
have cost peanuts and if he could have found the author(s) and
explained that he wrote an assembler for free distribution, they
probably would have given it to him.
The problem has been that Betov was the one who long ago stared on the
licencing issue and after some years of tolerance, he is just going to
keep hearing about his own illegal product until he shuts his mouth.
hutch--
>
> Oh! Yeah!... and you forget:
>
> 1) The Two-Click-Disassembler-Reassembler is a Piracy
> Tool that should be condamned.
Why listen to what I say here when everyone can listen to what Betov
has already said about his code rip off tool. Why write code in a
crapheap like BetovSpazm when you can steal it from code written in C
compilers and far more powerful assemblers.
> 2) The GPL is a Virus, and MicroSoft Eula saves users
> from the GPL oppression, and so forth, makes them free
> in a free world.
This is from the champion of GPL who stole commercial software to
write his own assembler and then GPLed it. Don't try and blame you own
theft on GPL as it does not legitimise your own conduct. Fortunately
those who use MASM are protected by the Microsoft EULA, just like
those who use assemblers that were written legaly in GPL software are
protected by the GPL licence. It is the few who use BetovSpazm who are
at risk because they used an assembler that is illegal.
> 3) MASM is a Powerfull Assembler.
You have at least got this one right but when the major market uses
MASM, its not for some crackpot political theory but because it IS the
most powerful assembler in the 32 bit Windows world.
> 4) Hutch-- is at the origin of the Assembly Rebirth and
> has hopefully saved the Assembly Programmers community
> from TASM, that was a Tool for writing... Viruses.
Rebirth is your term not mine and it will never happen as 32 bit
assembler was resurrected and viable before you even got your stolen
copy of another assembler to write BetovSpazm. To answer one of your
earlier assertions, Microsoft started the 32 bit assembler revolution
in 1993 with the 32 bit source code examples in MASM 6.11
Wanna a hot copy of Microsoft "hello.asm" dated 1993 ? Muhahahaha.
> 5) Betov is unethical because he writes a GPLed Assembler
> _for_ Windows (and ReactOS will never exist).
The GPL guru who write software purely for Microsoft format operating
systems is nothing more than bullsh*t. LINUX is the GPL OS that is
here today and getting better, when are you going to delete that pile
of crap and write a legal GPL licence assembler for LINUX ?
Frank Kotler
> Frank,
>
>>What's your definition of "derivative work"? If I write an assembler
>>using your MASM32 package, is my assembler a "derivative" of Masm?
>
> Yes. The difference is that you have the legal right to write whatever
> you like and distribute what you write without payment or royalties.
> When Betov used an assembler that was licenced for unlimited
> evaluation and then distributed its derived work, he STOLE the
> software as he was not licenced to distribute the derivation of that
> work.
Okay. Thank's for clearing that up.
Best,
Frank
Randall Hyde
>
> It is not. It can not be, as long as you write it completely yourself. If
this
> were not so, then BSD would had have a hard time, when they reworte their
> code. Also a blackbox technique to recreate copyrighted material would
also
> not be possible.
When using a HLL, keep in mind that you *don't* write it completely
yourself.
The HLL compiler generates machine language sequences that are based on
sequences the compiler writers created. Very early microcomputer compiler
vendors *attempted* to claim a copyright to the code their compilers
produced.
Obviously, this did not set well with people using those compilers and the
vendors
either changed their policy or watched their user base fade to nothing.
Of course, vendors also have copyrights on their standard libraries (which
most of them *do* enforce these days, so one compiler vendor cannot
rip off another).
Not that any of this applies to the RosAsm situation, of course.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde
hutch--
Thanks for finding this out, it confirms my view that all Betov had to
do was ask and they would have given it to him. It is unfortunate that
Betov instead took the shonky and dishonest way of stealing it when
they were willing to give it away for non commercial use.
It has been Betov's choice to continually raise the licencing issue so
its a matter that he will continue to hear until he shuts his mouth
and stops criticising other peoples work.
Betov
@posting.google.com:
Even with you nose in your own shiet, you will go on
saying it is chocolate, won't you?
Betov.