Still no kmod for new nvidia

Paul Allen Newell pnewell at cs.cmu.edu
Thu Jul 29 03:48:57 UTC 2010


On 7/28/10 11:37 PM, James McKenzie wrote:
>
> Describe 'reverse engineer'.  There is looking at the input/outputs of a
> module with no knowledge of the code of the module (called 'black' box)
> and then there is decoding to the machine code level ('white' box or
> 'gray' box.) There is a reason that Tandy versus IBM stuck.  Tandy
> watched what happened when an IBM PC booted on power up with a DOS disk
> in the machine (DOS remember was stolen and had been around as source
> code) and found that the Operating System queried a specific location in
> memory for the letters IBM.  They did that and made a better BIOS.  The
> company is now known as Phoenix. Other companies did a line-by-line
> decode of the BIOS and that got them in a bunch of trouble.  That is why
> 'black box' is acceptable, but 'white' or 'gray' box is not.
>    
> James McKenzie
>
>    
Very interesting paragraph ... I wanted to see if the forum would 
tolerate my asking a question on this.

If doing a "black-box" only job of "reverse engineering" requires one to 
load memory with a trademark, how does this fall into the realm of 
acceptable?

Curiosity only on this question, as it would seem to me that such would 
be an acknowledgment of ownership (as opposed to some random memory load 
for "validation check"?),

Thanks,
Paul



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