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Comment by TheJoeMan | Hacker News Reader

I don’t have any direct experience to suggest, but for your funding model you seem to be mostly concerned that you wouldn’t make much money after releasing the work due to piracy. Perhaps you could consider the crowdfunding model instead, collect the money first! It also has the benefit of implicit voting for most-wanted projects.

This model would be similar to the notorious Denuvo DRM cracker Empress, who is essentially the only person who can break this gaming anticheat. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_(cracker) . I will warn they have quite some drama about them, but the financials seem to be working.

I would also consider what your work could be useful for / value proposition for others. The trimmed-down Wii consoles come to mind. Perhaps a small group of people would heavily value a netlist of their favorite circuit that they could recreate even smaller with more layers/modern techniques.

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I strongly suspect a lot of people who could crack Denuvo simply do not want to.

We've grown up. We got solid, well paying developer jobs. I do not want to even risk violating some law. It's been a hoot 1987-2004 but I have not opened IDA in two decades. That book is closed. I doubt I am alone.

Once... so long ago... I could disassemble Z80 in my head. Today? C9 was RET. The rest I forgot.

The nature of life is as you age others are born. While your soul may have been crushed by the years, new smart but foolish ones have arisen to hack what you leave unhacked.

Sounds pretty much accurate.

Show me the young people that know how to work with IDA or Ghidra. The way to use tools like this without ever written assembly is way harder than the way we had 10 years ago. They found other things to hack, things where we don't know anything about.

It might seem that way but a few observations. The number of people in total hacking away is much much larger now. So the absolute numbers are probably similar or more, while in relative terms you’re probably right. But my observation with a young hacker in the house is there’s a lot of appreciation for how the machine really works amongst many kids. The high level glossy stuff doesn’t appeal as much as ripping the cover off and poking memory locations. I think this shows up in the amazing prevalence of electronics hacking these days, low power computing, etc. This is the best time to be a hacker, the tools at all levels are amazing. But real nerds like you and I are just as rare as ever, and can’t resist ripping the lids off.

There has never been a time in history of this planet with more people possessing those capabilities.

https://discord.gg/hKx3FJJgrV

I used Ghidra while I was in school to crack a copy of a CAD program- took forever but was totally worth it

The team that won Disobey’s CTF this year was very young. I don’t have a perfect eye for age, but I’d say the average age for the large group was around 20-25

https://picoctf.org/competitions/past.html

Unfortunately, too many of the young ones live in Apple's "What is a computer?" world. It's hard to become curious about the boot process when POST screens have been replaced by glossy progress bars and everything is locked down.

Those young ones in a prior generation would be kicking sand in the nerds face. Not every human will be a nerd, only a tiny fraction will have the true calling. But once called, they can’t help but rip back the veil and hack.

I think AI will make every complicated process much more accessible as you can interact with a, rounds to free, teacher that can explain each piece in the appropriate level of detail for your skill level.

Surely you cannot be this naïve? That "teacher" will not have your best interests at heart and all communication is closely monitored.

You’re not alone.

A couple weeks ago I played around with a piece of software for my personal usage, and I certainly won’t release anything at all.

Not worth the trouble with the law, I’m not underage anymore and a day job gets in the way of keeping the required mental state/context for RE.

Ah, the simpler times at the University when I had the time and energy.

Also games became very affordable compared to the time period you mentioned. The number of games worth playing were much, much fewer. Not to mention the F2P or even open source games we have now.

Well yes Diablo 2 was $50 when released http://web.archive.org/web/20000815052708/http://www.gamesto... which would be like $90 today adjusted for inflation. Diablo IV is $70 and people were raging how expensive that is. And Last Epoch is $35 and it seems like more fun than D IV. And of course Path Of Exile is free to play but you need to consider the price of a math degree totes required for that thing :D https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/wydq91/my_frie... And before someone posts the obligatory "Still sane, Exile?" I would like point out two things: a) I do have a math degree b) my Last Epoch Falconer is called TrappedInWraeclast. Sanity left the building, long ago :D

These are the words of someone who has not tried to crack Denuvo.

CD was CALL, 3E was LD A,imm but yes, I've forgotten most of them too.

Even ignoring the legal stuff (which a lot of hackers don't care about), Denuvo is an unbelievably pain in the ass to crack. It's kinda unique per game, so you have to redo a lot of work every time, and your reward for like 6 months of your life is the newest Madden. Most games get Denuvo removed anyway in future patches since it costs money annually to license it, so why bother.

> which a lot of hackers don't care about

Well, yeah, there was a time for that.

But, I can guess I can openly say this twenty years later, I was helping out one of the admins of the one of the largest warez sites in Central Europe and when that was raided (Operation Fastlink) -- police only found the proxies and couldn't find the owner so no one ever got indicted over this site -- I had a little chat with myself and, as I said above, closed that chapter of my life.

That server was really something else: imagine a normal mid tower chassis PC of the era but stuffed with IDE cards and next to it several piles of hard drives separated by little pieces of wood so they didn't overheat from touching. By the end, if memory serves, it was multiple terabytes.

This is the correct answer. Denuvo isn't hard to crack in any exciting engineering sense, it's just incredibly tedious. With the amount of time required, anyone with those skills would be better off just getting a white hat security gig for a stable paycheck, and buying the game.

What prevents that tedium from being automated?

Denuvo is designed to be an extreme pain to work with in a debugger or disassembler. Every game is its own unique maze full of dead ends, fake exits, and an ever-shifting array of clever tricks to detect when the binary is being debugged or disassembled, which quietly rearrange the maze to have no solution at all.

It's extremely tedious for a human, and the pay-off is relatively low, as hinted by the parent (what recent DRMed games are even any good?). I do wonder whether anyone has tried setting a well trained AI on the problem though.

> I do wonder whether anyone has tried setting a well trained AI on the problem though.

That was exactly my thought, if it is just brute force understanding debugging/assembly code a LLM could help.

Only one way to find out!

The reasons a set of heuristics and static code analysis can't do it is because the team developing it is constantly hard at work making Denuvo more difficult and annoying and significantly different every release. You may be able to automate version X of Denuvo after having cracked 5 games using that version, but version X+1 will be significantly different (but in a way that didn't require much work on Denuvo's end to change). The only way to fully automate it would be to have access to their source code, or be a literal super genius.

I'm not an expert on it but my understand is that one part is basically have a VM with custom opcodes, and every opcode is randomized and the set of opcodes used is a subset of a larger pool. Then the code running in the VM is autogenerated from normal code using these confusing and randomly selected made up opcodes. And that is only 1 piece.

The people who source pirated material (ie not the distribution groups, but the ones doing the actual cracking) are state-sponsored, not individuals doing it for fun. It's economic warfare; the purpose is to hurt profits while also giving economic benefit to the country doing the hacking, since its citizens won't have to pay for the software.

Or did you think that it was some sort of wild coincidence that the vast majority of software piracy groups are Russian?

Funniest conspiracy theory I've heard in a while.

A bounty hunter-like crowdfunding system would probably be ideal. I could probably hack together some forum software with each thread being a different crowdfunding campaign. Thanks for the suggestion.

I second the "crowdfund a particular circuit" process.

There are plenty of projects where a new PCB for an old device would be desirable:

* The vintage computers prone to capacitor/battery damage. There are a few Mac replacements, for example, but these are obviously hand-done labours of love.

* Classic Hi-Fi involves a lot of 40 year old boards with failing materials (for example, early two-sided PCBs where the second layer was literally painted on) An accurate netlist might also help improve quality of schematic info that's sometimes ancient service manual scans that are nearly illegible.

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