Actor Framework Discussions
A serious blow for innovation
AristosQueue wrote:
[...] no one is opening that unless they steal the earthmover. And the drivers of the earthmover work in pairs, one awake while the other sleeps, and they're both armed and vicious.[...]
One of the drivers stole the earthmover? 
jcarmody wrote:
One of the drivers stole the earthmover?
That's probably not the case, or even necessary.
I have seen a guy disassemble VIs without BD into enough information that you could recreate some version of a working BD. All objects (low and high level functions calls, subVI calls, data dependencies etc.) are present as code of course, although everything is numbered (indexed) instead of named as in all object files. Even though the fun currently stops at a bunch of text files to search through, it would give enough information about the inner workings of the code to give you a thorough idea of what is going on in the code. And if you are clever yourself, this information could get you the last 5% to your goal, if reverse engineering is your game. Other stuff, like the password protection scheme is childs play in comparison.
I think the above is wrong, and have in no way helped bring it about, nor will I ever. But it illustrates a point that is true in all compiled programming languages - in fact is true with all protection schemes. They will be broken eventually. You'll need to move beyond this wave if your income (or more) is dependent on a specific secret in your code you need to keep. You just have to do more than hide it. You need to use it in a way that the next guy didn't think of, since the secret itself will be out eventually. My own opinion is that if you use information gleaned this way for commercial purposes or to do harm to others, then you're a criminal. Simple as that. So one needs to be careful. Just because something can be done doesn't mean you should do it.
Some of the mentioned "hacking" will most definetely be violating the NI license agreements, and the guy I know does this for fun and doesn't share much of how it's done with everybody else. But he has told me a bit obout how he gets the information in the first place. That story is quite similar to several other cases I know about, regarding other technologies and other R&D stuff I've participated in myself. The steps usually involve a guy vacuuming up all the small nuggets shared by many different individuals "in-the-know", and piecing together more and more of the picture. Each piece of information is innocent by itself, but since usually one guy doesn't know what the other guy has also revealed, the sum will eventually be enough, and some outside clever person could fill in some of the missing pieces... There goes the LabVIEW file format, the internal workings of the compiler, the data formats...everything basically. Add time, and you have no more secrets.
If you share stuff people don't keep it to themselves. But you didn't keep the secret yourself, so isn't it naive to think the next guy will? And how can they keep "a secret", when most communication is happening on the internet anyway? But I understand your frustration Stephen, and your need to conserve your own back. Personally I'd much rather see stable, supported stuff appear, than have some half-baked info surface that creeps in and destroys your code due to you using some weird freebie software.
Years ago I was part of small external software development team who worked for HP. We signed NDAs and got all the good stuff. We kept it to ourselves, and a lot of good things emerged form that. An external group can sometimes act more dynamically than a bigger R&D departement. But if just a single guy in our group had disclosed one piece of information it would all have fallen down. So, I would strongly advice anybody who are possibly a part of such an operation to respect their NDAs. It would be devastating if the source of information was a "mole" in such a position, rather than the "nugget collection" I described earlier.
Cheers,
Steen
