• @[email protected]
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    8 hours ago

    Anyone know if it’s possible to take a program and “decompile” it? Like reverse engineering or something so it could be verified to be “clean?”

    I imagine with all the resources the government has they could achieve such a thing if they were really concerned about national security and not really just worried about metas profits.

    I mean what would Elon buying it have really changed about the actual code of the apps? It would just change who gets the profits, no?

    • TimeSquirrel
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      78 hours ago

      Best you can do is a disassembler that will turn it into readable assembly or some kind of best-guess pseudocode, and you’ll have to reconstruct it into a higher level language from there by yourself. Or learn to read assembly I guess.

      • @[email protected]
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        18 hours ago

        So if it’s possible then it’s possible for the government to have that done by people that are capable.

        That would tell me then that it’s more than likely not a national security concern, it’s a profit concern. Apparently Zuckerberg was a major actor pushing for this ban as it is, he supposedly kept harping on the security aspect. :/

        • @[email protected]
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          36 hours ago

          If the code were static and unchanging, sure. But it’s not possible to conduct such analysis every time an update is issued on a continuing basis, without fast becoming a hundreds of millions of dollars or more program.

          So the better question isn’t whether it’s possible — it’s whether it’s feasible. And the answer is no, it’s not.

          • TimeSquirrel
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            05 hours ago

            I think if pirates working on their bedroom PCs can release cracks and keygens only days after a game or other piece of software is out, then the government can probably keep up with app updates.

            • @[email protected]
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              15 hours ago

              It’s a lot easier to scan for very specific code behavior than it is to scan for “anything useful for espionage”. And that still wouldn’t solve the question of what their server software is doing or where the collected data is ending up.

        • TimeSquirrel
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          38 hours ago

          Oh yeah, with the resources the government has, they are more than capable of reverse-engineering everything the app is doing.