Lucky Green wrote :
Furthermore, as William has mentioned in the past, encrypted instruction sets make decompiling and thereby reverse engineering the application next to impossible.
Perhaps he has, but I believe I was the one to post about it first. As you know, my fear is magic stuff in OS inner rings that enforces social policies and perhaps also provides "sovereign right of lawful access" to you know who... Encrypted code may be very difficult to decrypt, and if the OS controls key management also nearly impossible to modify (presuming that the encryption is not just XOR'd with the instruction stream which would allow trivial modification once the instructions were decrypted). That combination is nice for copyright enforcement, but sure has some nasty other uses and is a fundemental enabling technology for such future statist possiblities as restrictions on running modified or unapproved software without a license to do so - a software developers license say, or the old Internet drivers license. I am sure that many businesses would be very happy if all their PCs would only allow software that management approved to run - there would be a huge market for such in fact... and probably a lot of the public would willingly buy machines that would only run approved software if they could pay less for the software or access first run movies or other candy unavailable on free machines. It is really hard to think of a way of controlling what the sheeple do with their computers that does not depend on hard encrypted code in both OS and application - code that is decrypted only inside the silicon of the CPU with precautions taken to make access to the decrypted streams very difficult and expensive for hardware probers. Years of trying other methods have failed to produce something practical from a cost and security standpoint; there are just too many smart and persistant people around who will find a means of attacking anything that is exposed. But it is also obvious that there are billions of dollars in revenue lost to software pirates and additional sales of copyright works that don't happen because the owners aren't happy if it is even remotely possible to obtain pirate copies. And money talks, and with those levels of dollars involved one can expect a lot of things to happen, especially in the current DC climate, and with the possiblity that such technology will both provide the protection of intellectual property that the big money interests want and the social control and surveillance that the fascists want. The good part is that making the whole thing adaquately secure is very hard and the attempt may fail, the bad thing is that there very well may be draconian laws that make any attempt to understand or modify the code running on one's computer a serious felony and people may be locked up for years for just trying to determine what a program is doing to them. There have already been attempts to create these laws. But I've said much of this before... Dave Emery die@die.com Weston, Mass.