This is a question that has been surfacing in my brain in my discovery of Linux and adoption of a new way to use my computer. I was watching a movie a while back, forgot the name, but the premise was a budding programmer hacked the source code of the reining OS and printed the code for the world to see. My question is, why can't this be done w/ Windows? My plebian thought process may be showing but if 16 year olds in Belarus can write viruses to crash hundreds of Windows using computers, what is to stop someone from extracting the source code of Windows and publishing to the world? It seems as if holes in the code are so easily, relatively, to exploit then why can't the entire code be put out there for anybody to rewrite, tweak, etc?

ethics

lawsuits

What the fsck does this have to do with Linux and why did you post in a Linux - General forum? Moved to General where this is more suitable. Please try to place your threads more appropiately, not everything goes in Linux - General.

but the premise was a budding programmer hacked the source code of the reining OS and printed the code for the world to see. My question is, why can't this be done w/ Windows?

http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,62282,00.html

Excuse me if I'm being ignorant...

But how exactly would one go about "extracting" source code from binaries?

I imagine you could draw some conclusions about how it worked with traces, etc -- but how could you possibly pull source code from a compiled binary?

--Shade

It's not difficult. It's a process called "Reverse Engineering". Here is some interesting decompilers and disassemblers:

http://www.free2space.com/tools/decompilers/setup.html

However, back to the original question, what should we learn from hacking Windows anyway?. Besides using the knowledge from hacking windows to improve, let's say, wine, there's nothing in there that we need... Is there good applications and games for Windows? Yes, but the operating system itself is junk...

i've herd you can't decompile win beacus it would take until hell freezes over, who said ethics, since when did virus programers have ethics

who would want to decompile an operating system, and windows? O'reilly's book 'security warrior' has a very good section on reverse engineering which mentions most people good at it are in linux now, not windows

Well this is so typical of people who cant program. Asking why things cannot be done when they dont understand the said thing. Sure you can decompile windows and have billions of lines of assembly. Compilation is a one way street you go down it and you are not comming back up.

It is hard to explain to someone who does not have an understanding of C and assembly but suffice it to say you lose the meaning of the code when you compile it.

That's what I was thinking, Stack -- Which is why I was confused.

--Shade

It's legal to de-compile or dissassemble a program in order to fix a mistake, but not to add new features. So in theory you could decompile parts of Windows and fix any mistakes completely legally, at least in the UK anyway.

Wouldn't it be easier to write the hole OS from scratch than fixing Windows problems? Lol, j/k. By the way, Starsky is a cool name from a TV show from the 70's, Starsky and Hutch. Funny game for PC and PS2 as well...

thats where I got my name from, I love that show

Anything can be decompiled, decrypted, de[insert name here]. You just have to think brute force

MD5's could be cracked, but it might take 2 billion years.