Here goes my two cents.

My buddies and I used to figure out how to make money cheats and sometimes other sorts of resource cheats for simulation games like SimCity and SimEarth. It'd be fun to play the game with limits on all your resources, but it could also be fun without such limits. Sometimes it's just nice to see if you can do better with unlimited cash, or to bulldoze and rezone an entire city to see what the game does. It's not really so much "cheating" when you're not playing an opponent. It's just exploring a slightly different game from what shipped. Half the fun was seeing how quickly we could find and decipher the data in the saved game files.

I do think that aimbots, resource cheats in multi-player games, unhiding hidden game elements like enemy troops, and such is pretty cheap and unethical. Well, unless the game you're playing is stated to be open to such manipulations to see who can twiddle the game system's bits the most effectively anyway. I do like the occasional explicitly free-for-all cheaters' server at a LAN party apart from the very strict no-cheating server.

Stealing, cracking software to steal a copy, defeating DRM to steal content, and stuff like that I strongly frown upon. Breaking DRM or cracking software to make something you've already bought more convenient to use with your own systems I condone.

Reverse engineering a file format for the sake of compatibility is not only useful and in my eyes perfectly acceptable. It is also sometimes absolutely necessary to ensure that you can make proper use of your own data. I can't count the number of times over the years I or a client of mine had older data for which no known suitable software was available for a contemporary operating system. Indeed, sometimes it's even necessary to get at data that's from an OS you no longer have working hardware to run. Without reverse-engineering the formats or using information from someone else who has, you'd lose anything that wasn't in an openly specified format from the beginning. This is why there's such a push for openly specified formats these days, so that most data won't cause these problems for people in the future.

In reply to Re^3: Is code related to reverse engineering appropriate? by mr_mischief
in thread Is code related to reverse engineering appropriate? by lilphil

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