Reverse Engineering for Beginners | Hacker News Reader

Reverse Engineering for Beginners

begin.re

430 pointsjacquesm27 comments

Completely over-engineered UX, it is almost as I have to reverse engineer the "app" to read the content.

I am always lost as to what kind of thought goes into creating this kind of bloated abominations to display static content.

why not? it's working properly and it's better structured

Most of the UI animations are laggy in my browser (Firefox 60).

Not on Firefox mobile it works but elements do not feel like they display right. And you can scroll down to see hover answers, which had no questions.

I found out what those were exactly since I jumped into desktop mode, which had even more noticeable issues.

I hate mobile first design choices for adaptive interfaces, since they in a lot of cases, aren't suited for either platform

It's not working properly at all! [1]

[1] https://imgur.com/a/xHGq2Gb

Very slow and laggy on my phone.

Agreed. This is exactly how a guide should not be like. Contentwise I think it's good so far.

Fetish.

Programmers tend towards the same behavior: if you've ever read through an over-engineered solution, you can tell it came from a person or team that privileged the technology over the solution. So it's a kind of technological fetish.

Same goes with visual design. "Want to see a site about reverse engineering? Well here's a giant animated triangle for you, gliding across the page like a fish. See what we did there, isn't that neat?"

I just closed it instantly because it didn't have a JS-free fallback of any kind and I run NoScript. As usual, turned out to be the right decision.

Given that it's someone's labour of love, they are allowed to do what seems like over-engineering to you, if they want to.

They have the right, yes. But they'll still suffer the consequence of exercising that right, however, in lost readership.

In a similar vein,

A free and open access book (libre) on reverse engineering by Dennis Yurichev. https://beginners.re/

Link to the english PDF : https://beginners.re/RE4B-EN.pdf (This is a 1000+ page mammoth!)

Ahh this guy put a hell of a ton of work into making this. Unfortunately he discontinued his more condensed version of the document (which I believe was about 300+ pages or so?), but he does it all for free and takes care of several different language editions so I don’t blame him.

Skimming through the materials, this looks interesting. It takes the approach of slides and exercises. I actually expected to see another site with the same name: https://beginners.re/ which provides a PDF book.

But the best resource I've found to learn reversing is liveoverflow's videos on YouTube. Any other suggestions?

The book Secrets of Reverse Engineering is still the best for me even after all those years.

I second liveoverflow , especially his binary hacking series

The site is horrible and broken.

I wish it wasn't based on IDA.

For better or worse, IDA is the standard tool.

Yes but no begginer is going to buy IDA. This would be much better with Radare2.

There are free versions though..

The free version doesn't have 64 bit support - to be fair though this tutorial doesn't seem to either.

That's too bad because almost everything is 64 bit now, even arm.

They do have x64 ever since they updated the freeware from 5.7 to 7.0..

Amazing! The website still says they don't. https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/order.shtml "IDA starter does not support 64 bit files"

If this is the case, they should update that! I will be trying for myself now.

IDA starter sadly is not the same as the free trial version...

It boggles my mind that the paid version is less powerful in some aspect than the free version

That's never going to change if IDA is all that people teach.

The email prep Q/A CSS is broken. The answer boxes cover up the questions. (Firefox Nightly 63.0a1)

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