On 12/30/06, Philip Tellis philip.tellis@gmx.net wrote:
Sometime Today, Amish Mehta assembled some asciibets to say:
Samba is what? Reverse engineering. Isnt it? Microsoft cant to anything about it.
You're confusing software and protocols. A software's licence can prohibit reverse engineering the software itself. A protocol cannot be protected by a licence.
As far as I know for knowing SMB protocol, MS Windows was reverse engineered, probably to know exactly how passwords are passed. Same is true for this Pacenet issue.
Wine, OpenOffice.org are also other examples of reverse engineering certain softwares.
The issue is if you can reverse engineer a software or not, whatever it is done for. Dont count on it but my opinion is as long as its not patented and its for personal use and it does not harm anyone, it should be ok.
"In the United States and many other countries, even if an artifact or process is protected by trade secrets, reverse-engineering the artifact or process is often lawful as long as it is obtained legitimately."
I referred to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering
Only problem is, in India no one clearly knows what is legal and not legal until the case is won.
I do not think decrypting password algorithm is such a big crime and infact Pacenet should instead have used better algorithm if they were much concerned about security.
Amish.