in reply to Re: Here is a commercial obfuscator
in thread Here is a commercial obfuscator

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Re^2: is it irreversible
by diotalevi (Canon) on Mar 14, 2003 at 13:39 UTC

    I think that if the primary benefit of this script is to rename all the meaningful symbols away then I can do that just as well using my text editor's replace-all function. I get that for free.


    Seeking Green geeks in Minnesota

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Re: Re: is it irreversible
by kodo (Hermit) on Mar 14, 2003 at 13:44 UTC
    Uhm well they want 1879$ for that tool. Really funny I guess you won't need more than some hours to write something much more obfuscating.
    Just rename all vars back to something more readable like $var_1 etc, and it's pretty readable I think.
    Of course it makes it a bit more hard to study the code but it's definitly not even worth 100$.

    kodo (http://kodo.me.uk)

      I guess that depends on whether you put a dollar value on the time it takes to write that - I suppose the 1K-2K price might be reasonable if the perl programmer is somehow braindead and it'd take a long time to write (more than a few hours) or if the programmer has a high value at which point either something obvious and simple will arise or its just worth the money to buy a license.

      Just keep in mind through all this that there are other considerations outside of mere price tag.


      Seeking Green geeks in Minnesota

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What would I want to study obfuscated software for?
by crenz (Priest) on Mar 14, 2003 at 15:07 UTC

    But will you be able to study the 500kb of obfuscated perl source

    Now, I won't, and I wouldn't want to, either. To be frank, the projects I am working on usually have tight budgets and schedules. It would simply cost too much time to wait for some external company to make the necessary changes to their software to suit our needs. Therefore, I rather rely on open-source software (be it free or commercial) with known code quality to make sure I can meet my deadlines.