Talk:Obfuscation (software)

message: There's a long list of "recreational" examples that are not cited in any way. They may also have POV, given use of some words without a source ("unintelligible", "famous", "extremely difficult"...). Also, the last example is way too long to illustrate a minor (?) section of the article.Otus (talk) 13:57, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Uncited examples 

message: Given there were no objections, I went ahead and made some changes. I removed the NPOV tag as well as the citation tag. MLetterle (talk) 17:34, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Biased Against Obfuscation? 

message: Maze program compilation section rewritten to point out that -fwritable-strings is not available anymore as of gcc 4.0. I also added a link (right after the Perl example) to obfuscated Python examples found in the official FAQ.
Tekkaman 13:12, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Added version note for -fwritable-strings 

message: It has been suggested that Code morphing be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)
I agree. I think "Code Morphing" has been claimed as a trademark by Transmeta and I must say that I've not come across it in the context of obfuscation/shrouding. MarkMLl (talk) 20:57, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge? 

message: I can't understand a thing about how that Twelve days of Christmas program works. Neither, I take it, can almost anyone else. Its creator must have had a twisted mind. Has anyone tried to analyse how it works?
* Thomas Ball from MSR has done it , Sliwers 19:29, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Twelve days of Christmas 

message: With all due respect, simply considering yourself to be an expert on a subject does not qualify you to make undocumented or unverified claims on Wikipedia. This page needs a complete rework, too much redundant information and ego inflating, in my opinion.
I would not consider myself an expert on the matter, so somebody please step up and mercilessly cut the fat from this article. I will correct some of the grammatical and punctuation errors.
Spragc 14:40, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Obfuscation

message: Reading this article in entirety I found it to be badly organized, thus I changed the headings and removed redundant sections whilst trying to pay as much respect as possible to the original author. Please understand that my goal is to make this a useful article for others (such as myself) with a limited knowledge of obfuscation. I'm guessing from reading the previous discussion that this wiki has suffered a great deal of hacking, so my changes are primarily cosmetic, mostly changing language and removing redundant information.
Here, briefly, are the changes:
-- Improper header importance was given to a set of articles halfway through, it appeared as though somebody has simply pasted another wiki directly into the center of this one. 
-- I removed the redundant information which included a general description of obfuscation, and it's use in reverse engineering. 
-- A section on defective obfuscators was removed as the defective nature of these programs should be questioned, if these programs are defective by nature, and not "buggy", this should be stated and links to proof or original research cited, please.
-- Grammatical changes were made to the debugging section under disadvantages. These changes were intended not to modify the nature of the article but to increase it's readability.
-- Concealment of evidence title changed to "Uses in malicious software". I believe this to be a much more appropriate header, considering the content beneath this header.
Spragc 15:09, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Multiple edits by myself 

message: Would anyone be willing to compile a list or comparison of obfuscators, so that external links can be cleaned up. For the moment I think most of the external links are valid because they are usefull, but it would be even more usefull to give them a page of there own. Martijn Hoekstra 13:42, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Obfuscators / extrenal links 

message: The article focuses mostly on code obfuscation, but data can be obfuscated too.
For example, this occurs with some digital audio players that do not allow normal MP3 files to be played but allow obfuscated MP3 files to be played (The Sony Network Walkman NW-S23 uses a substitution cipher).  The reason for this is not exactly clear, but Vendor lock-in seems the most probable.  I'd be the first to agree that the boundary between obfuscation and encryption seems a bit vague.   Anyway just thought I'd mention it to help make the article more rounded.  Pgr94 00:26, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Obfuscation can be applied to data too 

message: How come this page doesn't mention "HTML encryption"? There are companies selling products for it. It is noteworthy that it is totally useless because any decent DOM analysis tool (i.e. Firebug) would be able to regenerate the real source from the DOM structure. In fact you can regenerate it using a bookmarklet. --Voidvector (talk) 10:25, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  "HTML encryption" 

message: This article contains way too much source code. It isn't necessary to have more than one or two small examples (the C maze program from the IOCCC is a great one!), nor is it useful to the average reader to show several steps of obfuscating the prime-number generator. This information could be presented more densely, and with more English and less C, by simply describing the obfuscations without necessarily illustrating each one with a full copy of the source code. Thoughts? --FOo (talk) 17:10, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I have made lots of edits, added links, and in particular split the main example into a separate section (and added a couple of notes). I am not 100% happy with it, but I think it's better than it was. Sorry if I am jumping in with two left feet, but usually I get no sodding responses on the discussion pages so I just go ahead and edit-- then you do! SimonTrew (talk) 13:37, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Too many examples? 

message: This page uses words like "intellectual property" that are incorrect and it consider this usage as advantage. It is not advantage. NPOV shoul consider it as form of usage only.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.18.126.50 (talk) 17:52, 14 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV 

message: I compiled and ran the code 
void primes(int cap) {
  int i, j, composite;
  for(i = 2; i < cap; ++i) {
    composite = 0;
    for(j = 2; j * j < i; ++j) 
      composite += !(i % j);
    if(!composite)
      printf("%d\t", i);
  }
}
and it works fine, but the obsfuscated code 
_(__,___,____,_____){___/__<=_____?_(__,___+_____,____,_____):!(___%__)?_(__,___+_____,___%__,_____):___%__==___/
__&&!____?(printf("%d\t",___/__),_(__,___+_____,____,_____)):___%__>1&&___%__<___/__?_(__,_____+
___,____+!(___/__%(___%__),_____)):___<__*__?_(__,___+_____,____,_____):0;}main(){_(100,0,0,1);}
for this program doesn't 
do what it's supposed to, and what is worst it ends up with a segmentation 
fault.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tyomero (talk • contribs) 23:27, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wrong behaviour 

message: the winner "Hou Qiming scientific calculator doc" search using google returns no scientific calculator to download or to study for its documentation. it seems the "best self documentating calculator" is not available.188.25.53.154 (talk) 04:47, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  winner`s CALCULATOR

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on Obfuscation (software). Please take a moment to review my edit. You may add  after the link to keep me from modifying it, if I keep adding bad data, but formatting bugs should be reported instead. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether, but should be used as a last resort. I made the following changes:
*Attempted to fix sourcing for http://www.devx.com/microsoftISV/Article/11351
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at ).
Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 03:55, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 2 external links on Obfuscation (software). Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20050308231232/http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~collberg/Research/Students/DouglasLow/obfuscation.html to http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~collberg/Research/Students/DouglasLow/obfuscation.html
*Corrected formatting/usage for http://research.microsoft.com/~tball/papers/XmasGift/
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 19:45, 1 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: One of the listed benefits is "shrinking the executable." Likewise, one of the disadvantages is "it may trigger antivirus even if the developer just did it to reduce code size"
This seems to conflate obfuscation with minification and similar optimizations. While source code minification (the removal of comments, whitespace, and sometimes line breaks, and perhaps switching to shorter, less descriptive variable names) could be considered to obfuscate the code somewhat, this is often done simply to reduce bandwidth use and accelerate parsing (e.g. in Javascripts for web) without intent to obfuscate. Similarly, symbol stripping could be considered to both obfuscate a binary executable and reduce its size, but that is usually seen primarily as a size reduction measure, while something speficially designated as an automatic obfuscator would take further measures beyond this. Similarly, machine code produced by a compiler invoked with aggressive optimization flags could be seen as somewhat obfuscated in terms of being less easy to decompile/reverse engineer than non-optimized code, but again this is incidental, and not really seen as within the domain of obfuscation.
I would think that any deliberate obfuscation outside of these measures (which are not strictly obfuscation techniques, even if they can have that effect to some extent) would tend to increase code size and complexity rather than reduce it, by doing things in a more complicated and roundabout way than necessary. Nlburgin (talk) 17:16, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I have tagged both offending statements with Template:How Nlburgin (talk) 17:51, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Obfuscation vs. minification?