A windozian reverser @ the Linuxday Please be patient: my english is not the best around. I even wondered if I
should have held this workshop in Italian, that according to some friends I speak slightly
better than english :-( I'll decide on the spot, in Milan, after having seen
the visages of the people listening to me.
Ok, let's begin.
First of all: I'm not a real Linux buff. I was *nix oriented eons ago, but
I have reversed windows software for so many years, now,
that I am much more familiar with windozes 'guts' than with Linux reversing.
Web-teachers of mine
told me a long time ago that we must spread knowledge where the fishes are, and as a
matter of fact, like it or not, until recently the zombified masses of PC users
of this planet seemed to love windows and dislike Linux.
Fortunately this is changing more and more: a lotta
zombies are now springing onto the Linux bandwagon as well. Equity approaches.
Windows comes now in so many flavours (95, 98, NT, ME, 2000poor, 2000rich) that
even idiots get scared. Drivers problems in windoze are nowaday even worse than
those encountered among the different distributions of Linux.
Anyway the operating system you use is relatively irrelevant when searching the web.
Admittedly Linux offers a more stabile platform and better control possibilities
about malwares (software that spyes your habits, a very widespread pest in
windows), and you should use Linux - by all means -
but some powerful reversing and searching tools are windoze's oriented (to say the
least), and ignoring this when mining data would be a serious mistake.
To-day I'm going to chat with you about some 'websearching techniques' that
can help you to find what you are looking for, and that will allow you
to find - also - what you are not (yet)
looking for.
I also want to underline the cosmic power that
software reverse engineering can give you. Therefore I will close this workshop demonstrating
a simple technique to get rid
of advertisement banners planted inside software (using webferret as an example). Since
this approach does not require any particular software reversing skill, and can thus be applied
by anyone with eggplant level brain, it
should put a nice stop to a pestering habit (and billion dollars industry) that
utterly annoys me.
But first of all you must understand the dimension of the problem that web-searchers have to face:
proceed to the growth of the web
