Bit like Best Policeman is an Ex Criminal

In a weird sort of way, you can think of us a "program psychologists". The software WANTS to run, it's only happy when it does what it was designed to do. It usually has inperfections that restrict it from doing this, we remove those inhebitions... Happy software is running software.

OK, enough...

There's the obvious challenge, "because it's there". Cracking's fun and relaxing, with the occasional pulling out of ones own hair. It's gratifing to see a program run the way it should, without all the nasty protection.

But I'm not in it for the "cracking", but rather the reversing. Sometimes the most challenging code to reverse is the protection. If you think about it, these routines are usually written to be hard to understand. By becoming apt at dealing with code that is intentionally convoluted, regular routines become childs play. It's a bit of "practice makes perfect".

My motivation is knowledge and experiance. I become a better reverser by cracking, and I become a better programmer by reversing. I nearly always pay for the software I use, I don't release "cracks". My trophies are the algorythims, and I never use them until I understand them well enough to come up with my own.

I doubt you'll find any "thiefs" on this or Woodmans forum. No one here is out to hurt software developers, most of us ARE software developers.

Cracking improves your debugging skills. Reversing improves your coding skills. These skills would be nearly imposible to pick up any other way.

So, dump the VB, get a C++ compiler and Olly, and come over to the Dark Side. You won't regret it...

There's the obvious challenge, "because it's there". Cracking's fun and relaxing, with the occasional pulling out of ones own hair. It's gratifing to see a program run the way it should, without all the nasty protection.

Have to agree with that. I'm hardly the worlds best reverser, but I do it for/to gain the knowledge. I'd rate myself as a good coder, and reversing helps me to code better. You see certain things in the deadlist that aren't .... "apparent" .... in the higher level code (C++ etc). But most of all, I do it because I have a personal interest in security, and it's all related.

Well - Ive been in IT for near on 14 years now - and one thing that never ceases to surprise me is how little I know!!.

I'm just starting to get the idea of API and I see all this.

My proper job is business analays and mainly database automation. Never touched C or C++ skimmed Java (totally useless at it - only did it for 2 days), ASP n stuff - I'm most comfortable in VB / VBA.

Cut my teeth on DataEase (you youngsters wont remember that hehe) and pretty much a guru at that - but its outdated - now doing mostly VBA, it delivers up open-source for the company, VB source gets lost....


So your challenges are on a different scale to mine - I like the delivery of automating manual processes and interfacing and finding solutions to buisness needs - I suppose I'm miles away from reversing - but I understand the theory behind the pleasure you get.