[Tfug] Why would *anyone* leave a door open?

[Bexley Hall]

> I'm surprised nobody has linked to this yet:
> 
> http://xkcd.com/538/
> 
> I'd recommend Schneier "Beyond Fear" book for people
> interested in the soft, non crypto side of security...
> 
> To prevent your network being used by people trying to get a quick
> internet fix, even WEP is good enough if there are open networks in
> the area.  It's the old joke about two guys being chased by a bear,
> and one stops to put on his shoes saying to the other "I
> don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you".

Yes, but that just fosters more misuse by folks who should *learn*
better.  I.e., once the bear eats the slow guy, who's to say the bear
doesn't take up after you, too??!  ;-)

Folks who "hack" into things often do it for the mere challenge.

Many years ago, arcade games were *flagrantly* copied.  There
would only be token effort made to disguise the original game
on which the counterfeit was based.  At the time, there were 
two classes of games in use:  "90 day wonders" (after 90 days,
no one wants to play it anymore so you can recycle the cabinet,
electronics, etc. and replace it with a NEW machine) and those
machines with "holding power".

Of course, every manufacturer wanted to produce "hits".  But,
many of the counterfeiters would just settle for getting something 
out *quickly* (i.e., by doing NO design work of their own and
just stealing someone else's thunder) and hope they could make
a quick buck before customs officials got wise and started
seizing their shipments in the ports.

To prevent (discourage) counterfeiting, there were lots of
tricks played in the software (and hardware -- lots of full custom
ICs came about in this timeframe) to make copying harder.  The
goal wasn't to *prevent* copying (thought that would be a nice
consequence!) but, rather, to slow the copiers down until you could
grab the lion's share of the "play" out there.

Without going into detail about what sorts of things were done
to "protect" the products, many years later I ran into one of my
friends who had designed several of these "hits".  He recounted
to me the tale of a guy who had bought (for himself) one of
these particular games and systematically went through and reverse
engineered the software and the custom hardware.  And, did it in
such great detail that he was able to show my friend (who wrote the
code) all of the mechanisms that had been added to the software
for no *real* reason except to prevent tampering.

Remember, this isn't like reverse engineering some code that runs
*on* a PC -- where you can call up a symbolic debugger and star 
filling in blanks and updating a "source image" on disk.  This
is a bunch of ROMs and assembly language code that deliberately
does things "wrong" in places (e.g., using the operAND of one
instruction as an opCODE in another; jumping to locations *in* 
the stack; etc.).

I.e., this guy was just *insane*!  *Why* go to all this trouble?
He's already got one of the machines in his living room, what
more does he want??  (i.e., just "to know"!)