Emily St＊

[...] in the system (imports, like our printf and strcmp functions, among others); and executable machine code. Disassembling the Program It’s the machine code we’re interested in now. This is the [...]

[...] many files and holding many abstractions in your head to understand any non-trivial piece of source code. Using or modifying a complex system requires deeper and more expert knowledge of the system. [...]

[...] down. Now we need a bit of code to accept a string as input and call is_valid on it. This source code is likewise pretty standard. It prompts the user to type in a string and reads it in to a [...]

[...] to a later one by going down a pipe. The Minus World glitch required you to get near the first warp zone and then do some weird maneuver that lands you in a glitched version of that warp zone, such [...]

[...] While writing about the warp zone hacking in my last post, I mentioned offhandedly how I lost interest in video games in the 90s. [...]

[...] play when my turn is over,” his turn would last far longer than yours. That fed into a feedback cycle where girls got less play time altogether, fell behind in terms of ability, lost interest in [...]

[...] isn’t my intention!) languages like Ruby and Python unfortunately also lengthen the feedback cycle between making certain kinds of mistakes and seeing an error produced from them. In the [...]

[...] ;t have to bother with the glitch. I did it by directly manipulating the contents of the Super Mario Brothers ROM. In fact, I was able to tell that warp zone to take me anywhere I liked, including [...]

[...] ’s the machine code we’re interested in now. This is the interesting part! Machine code is binary data, a long string of numbers which correspond to instructions the processor understands. [...]

[...] most applications are distributed as app bundles which are essentially folders holding the executable program itself and some ancillary resources. Again, with file, we can see this directly by running [...]

Over the weekend at Women Who Hack I gave a short demonstration on reverse engineering. I wanted to show how “cracking” works, to give a better un [...]

[...] us understand the machine code (the stuff in the second column). We have to modify the program file itself by finding and changing those hexadecimal numbers somewhere in the file. After [...]