The Appeal of Reverse Engineering

 Since I've told myself I'll write every day, it probably won't be a good idea to skip today, even though I have little that comes to mind easily. Today, I made a mistake and disappointed myself. But I don't want to talk about that.

I'll talk about something a bit more interesting. The idea of "hacking" has a strange appeal to the mind. Simply being forbidden to do something generates an interest in that thing and an urge to do it. Restrictions that complicate an otherwise simple task are only part of the reason that hacking is appealing.

Reverse engineering, such as attempting to understand the internals of an executable by dumping the assembly code from an ELF executable or reading the ROM of a video game cartridge, is certainly not intended for the end user of the product and even sometimes illegal (for example, it's illegal to reverse engineer Word). But, the prospect of being sneaky and nonetheless finding out some information that was supposed to be hidden is too delightful. Certainly much more delightful than being given the source code at face value.

I recently saw online a broken music player that was put outside with the sign "Doesn't work, but fun to fix". I can certainly understand such an idea.