Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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Reverse Engineering SE - Not Yet Ready For Public Beta [closed]
Update:
You've come together and have all done a great job on getting this site defined, Reverse Engineering SE will progress to a public beta in the near future.
Congratulations, and please keep up ...
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Who should the moderators be?
As stated here about a week or two into the public beta, three candidates will be appointed moderator pro tempore.
This is a thread to nominate such candidates.
Nominees should:
Have a reasonably ...
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Are questions about trying to make reverse engineering harder appropriate?
I'm wondering if questions about how to make reverse engineering more difficult are within the scope of this site?
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Should We Have Reverse Engineering Competitions to Increase Site Participation
A possible technique to increase site participation would be to hold periodic competitions of reverse engineering challenges. The challenges would be custom made for these contests and could include ...
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Celebrating 10th year anniversary
It has been ten years of Reverse Engineering on the StackExchange network, can you believe it?
From modest beginnings as a proposal on Area51 by X01xtTv to the long journey as a beta site and finally ...
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Are questions involving finding and exploiting software bugs allowed here?
For example, questions like "how do I tell if this crash is a buffer overflow?" or "what is a good way of exploiting heap overflows?" Basically, I want to know if this community is more focused on ...
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How about finally enabling syntax highlighting for RE.SE?
I would like to once again put forward this old proposal. Let's activate syntax highlighting for RE.SE.
Currently it is not enabled.
There are plenty of examples of Python code for helper scripts in ...
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Do not accept an answer so fast!
I know, you want to accept an answer to show the problem is solved. But really, the quality of the site can be improved when you do not accept an answer too fast.
An answer might be correct and ...
user187
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Are questions about malware functionality on topic
Are questions about the functionality or workings of malware on topic? This does not include questions about how to reverse engineer malware, but instead asks about specific API calls or functionality ...
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Extend the topic to "Software Security"?
I am feeling really good in the RE website, the topics feet me and the discussions are quite interesting. But, then I noticed the IT-security website and tried to see what kind of community was there (...
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What to do with questions of type "Decompile this assembler code"?
Just now, I have edited a question of type "Decompile this assembler code".
It is not the first one and it will not be the last one...
I know that, whatever we do, we will encounter this kind of ...
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How should book/tutorial questions be dealt with?
There was recently a question asking about tutorials on Reverse Engineering. I understand that this is something that will come up quite frequently and will probably be one of the most popular ...
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Our Community Promotion Ads
One way we can promote this site is to create a community promotion ad to be shown on other SE sites. Each graduated SE site has a meta question where people can submit these ads (math, physics), and ...
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How do we increase the number of questions being asked?
I noticed that our new question per day is really low. What can we do to overcome this?
Should we seed more content ourselves?
I can think of few newbies questions I can ask an answer myself. Is it ...
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Who are the notable bloggers in the RE community, and how can we get them involved?
We have established a repository having some excellent questions. Its now time to get the word out about RE.
There are many people in the online world who manage very active and productive blogs. ...
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Are source code reverse engineering questions on-topic?
The thing is that I'm developing a platform for software (source code) reverse engineering (static-analysis). And I've added two questions about that: Should I keep parenthesis information while ...
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How should we handle posts in which reverse engineering is prohibited by a EULA?
When I went to the vendor's firmware download page linked to in Need help identifying main processor for Roland synthesizer I saw this in the EULA:
Restrictions: You may not make or distribute ...
julianMod
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Moderator Pro Tem Announcement
Throughout the beta, we need members from the site whose focus is to engage the community, both in community-building issues and site management. That's why we select a few members from each community ...
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Should we hold a community event in the chat?
There's a chat room for our site and I was just talking to AshRj, wondering how to promote the chat itself. He suggested holding a community event. A moderator would have to create it, but we could ...
0xC0000022LMod
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Let's get critical: Jun 2013 Site Self-Evaluation
We all love Reverse Engineering Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from ...
CommunityBot
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Reminder: we have a chat
This is not a question but just a reminder that we have a site-wide chat which is currently somewhat underused.
Do you have a question but not sure if it's on-topic or how to formulate it properly to ...
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What can we improve? The site seems to stagnate
At the moment the stats on Area51 aren't all too promising. While we got through the definition and commitment phase with flying colors, right now the situation is suboptimal.
The number of users ...
0xC0000022LMod
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Linking to malicious code
I asked a question about obfuscated javascript - the javascript in question is malicious, and contains code to exploit various browsers. In a comment, DCoder asked for the actual obfuscated code.
I ...
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Does the site scope include biology?
Are questions that deal with reverse-engineering/understanding biological phenomena on topic ?
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How to handle "beginner" questions?
Specifically this is about: How do I get the location of the original audio/video file embedded on a webpage?
I know that this question isn't as deep as others. But on the other hand it is for many ...
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Should we keep the "reverse-engineering" tag?
Right now we have a reverse-engineering tag. I would like to raise the question of whether we should keep it or not, and suggest we remove it.
If my answer gains enough upvotes and not too many ...
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What should our faq contain?
Following "The 7 Essential Questions of Every Beta", what should our faq contain?
This meta kind of starts the discussion, but perhaps we should have one place to sum it all up with a list of "good" ...
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How should software questions be tagged?
Given the preponderance of Stack Overflow, I expect this site to have a lot of questions about software. However, software is just one of many things one may want to reverse engineer. The inclusion of ...
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Is it OK to duplicate information from SO?
If a question has already been asked on SO, is it OK to repost questions with a self-answer (FAQ style) if they are very relevant to RE (e.g. useful questions about disassemblers, assembly language ...
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What’s the “elevator pitch” for our site?
As per "The 7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta":
Imagine you’ve just gotten on an elevator with a friendly stranger.
You have precisely one floor to describe your community to them. What
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Keeping hardware powered up!
The tag hardware is a very rare tag on RE.SE
HW questions make up just 6% of the total questions on the site. Seeing that reverse engineering hardware is in scope and in many cases, has overlapping ...
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Valid questions edited by authors to gibberish
I happened to notice this odd behaviour twice recently and I'm wondering why this might be happening. For me this is kind of strange as the questions were legit ones before the edit. Also with valid ...
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StackOverflow states: "Temporary policy: ChatGPT is banned" -- What should be our policy? Same or not?
TL;DR
Downvote this question, if in favor of allowing AI-generated content
Upvote this question, if in favor of banning AI-generated content
The problem
As you may have noticed ChatGPT, a language ...
0xC0000022LMod
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Folks, please upvote questions, too!
I have noticed for quiet some time now that the poster of an answer can have three or more upvotes, but the asker gets none whatsoever.
I think this is discouraging for those asking the questions and ...
0xC0000022LMod
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Do we want to be a high-voting site?
Some stack exchange sites get lots of both upvotes and downvotes for question and answers. Others get much fewer votes. Do we want to be a high-voting site?
Here is one perspective from Scott ...
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Community Polls Thread
Welcome to the RE.SE Community Poll thread!
Note: Order answers by active to see the most recent polls.
This thread is used for opinion and usage polls around RE and RE.SE.
The poll questions are ...
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Should questions to the effect of "How do I decrypt this file/data?" be considered on-topic?
Edit: just found this question from 2014: Decryption of ciphertext. This is essentially an updated version of that question with more data and a request for clarification since there is nothing in the ...
julianMod
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Too 'narrow' questions
There has been discussion about too broad questions here, but we lack the analogon for too narrow questions. Motivation for this question are the comments under Can Radare2 support word-based ...
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What are the rules here regarding possibly illegal tools for RE?
Because of the nature of reverse engineering, we may possibly use tools of gray or possibly illegal nature to aid our work, even if the work's intention is not for illegal use.
I recently posted an ...
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Are questions from hobbyists, makers and enthusiasts on-topic?
This question was prompted by a comment to a question in another discussion on EE.SE here.
From the tour page of this site I read (emphasis mine):
Reverse Engineering Stack Exchange is a question ...
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Upcoming site graduation: leaving beta on 2021-12-16
since the proposal in 2013, our site has steadily garnered interest and and influx of new community members. Igor also pointed out, that we probably owe the whole idea taking shape to Rolf pitching it ...
0xC0000022LMod
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Are questions that involve DRM reverse engineering allowed?
I live in the United States. The DMCA and similar laws apply to me, and even innocent and morally permissible software development practices can be illegal. Specifically, anything that involves ...
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Are questions containing 'what does this do' on topic?
Over on IT Security we fairly regularly get questions containing a believed-to-be malicious code snippet. The OP is usually a web-admin of some kind and has discovered the snippet on his server, and ...
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How to encourage users to post search-engine friendly content?
There have been a number of questions recently 0, 1, 2 and 3 which all contain largely screenshots (at the time of this writing). However, while some of the screenshots have merit in that they show ...
0xC0000022LMod
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Tracking Area 51 site stats
This post is intended to keep tracks of our Area 51 stats over time and to see our progress towards graduation.
For graduation, the rough criteria are :
Mostly green (Excellent) on the stats page
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Is asking about reverse engineering tools on topic
I would like to know if asking about the use of a tool that is designed for the purposes of reverse engineering is on topic?
The questions that follow under this category would be asking about ...
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Should questions contain quotes if they refer to external sources?
In this particular case I am referring to Treating independent code as a function in IDA Pro (and I don't mean to make this a pillory at all!)
Original (full) answer as of this writing:
This is ...
0xC0000022LMod
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Questions about applicable, but non-reverse engineering related questions
The topicality of "forward engineering" came up recently in
How does GDB's process recording work? The case was made that the question was not a true reverse engineering discussion and was more ...
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Let's get critical: Feb 2015 Site Self-Evaluation
We all love Reverse Engineering Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from ...
CommunityBot
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Wargames, crackmes and CTFs - how to deal with spoilers?
Since this site is public now, I guess we shall start to see questions related to
solving challenges on some wargame, solving a crackme and so on... As someone how has learned a great deal by doing ...
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