taos:
Rule One of Relationships: You can
NOT explain to a "significant other" why you might prefer to spend more time sitting in font of a computer screen taking software apart than you do paying attention to "them." And if you do spend more time stairing at the screen, it strongly suggests that there is already something amiss in the relationship. Life
IS more important than reversing.... but not much.
Thomas:
Rule One of Responsibility: Being held "responsible" often has nothing at all to do with what one has actually done. Someone nearly always gets the "blame". Sometimes whether they deserve it or not.
And I don't believe anyone can truely be "taught" reversing. They can be helped along the way, but it is a skill set which needs to be "learned" by doing the work, reaching an impass, reading more and/or asking a few questions and trying again. One can always impliment solutions others have provided to a particular problem, but there is no true "learning" without
understanding what one has just done and why those particular steps worked in the particular circumstance.
One of the interesting things about reversing is that it is, essentially, a never ending contest between the protectionists and the reversers. People spend time and effort to constantly make new challenges for the other side and adopt their techniques and strategies.
However, one fundimental observation I've come to over the many years is that if you can prevent attempts to screw with your debugger and can throw enough time at the disassembly, most problems (except probably REALLY GOOD encryption) can be solved
eventually. Many protections depend upon the likelyhood that one is not really that stuborn or the project simply isn't that interesting to be allocated sufficient time to overcome the challenges. Of course the very concept of being willing to spend the time it takes violates "Rule One of Relationships".
Fortunately, most of the time, no one forces us to reverse engineer.
Regards,