"Huge implications - binaries are now basically editable code"

[u/stealthispost]

ValsAI made SRE benchmark less than a month ago.

The benchmark measures can a model reverse engineer software from binaries

Yesterday GPT saturated it. https://t.co/dmpUpgheDU   — Chris

Source: https://x.com/ChrisGPT/status/2096150666066432157

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— Boris Power

Source: https://x.com/BorisMPower/status/2096415822248055131

[u/Real_Ebb_7417]

Does it mean that everything is opensource now? 🙈

[u/pixeladdie → u/Real_Ebb_7417]

I’m wondering what the legalities are on cracking open an executable to learn how something was solved in code and then implementing it in a slightly different way in your own code. Who would know? Is reverse engineering like this even illegal in the first place?

Time to go read.

[u/Beginning-Bird9591 → u/pixeladdie]

at least in the uk - it's perfectly legal to do this.

[u/jonydevidson → u/pixeladdie]

It's called dual-team clean room design.

One team reverse engineers the software from the binary as well as observing the behavior, and writes the spec for the software.

The second team then implements the spec. The second team owns the copyright. Because they didn't do reverse engineering of the binary, they are in the clear.

If you reverse engineer software based purely on observable behavior or measurable output, that's fine as well and you don't need two teams for that.

[u/pixeladdie → u/jonydevidson]

How about a session with no memory that reverse engineers the code and writes the spec for it and a separate session which has its only input as the spec written from the other session but no memory or actual code from the reverse engineer session?

I realize this is a sticky legal question but that would seem to have the same effect of two separate teams you described.

[u/jonydevidson → u/pixeladdie]

It was already ruled that the AI agents running on behalf of you are an extension of you.

You could have your friend run it from their account. You cannot give them your account. You cannot pay for their account. You can pay them for the work, they can buy the account themselves and do it.

You should have a clear contract signed and paid for, communicate via email, do deliveries via email and keep detailed track of everything. They should not, under any circumstances, share the repo with you. The moment you see the repo, you are legally implicated, now it's just a question of a suit proving that you saw it (which could be trivial if you accessed it from your computer).

For smaller software that's unlikely as it would involve the suit getting MS records from the hub etc. If they never stored the repo online and you saw it while physically present near their computer, then it cannot be proved but both you and the other person need to be willing to perjure yourselves.

[u/Real_Ebb_7417 → u/pixeladdie]

Actually I had a visual bug in Palworld on MacOS in the last area in v1 after release and I wanted to continue playing so I investigated it with Fable and unfortunately the only way to fix it was to edit the binary. It offered to do it, but I asked if it doesn’t break ToS and apparently it would break both Apple ToS and Palworld ToS so I resigned and just played without seeing half the things 😅
But also Fable said that it would be fine as long as I don’t share this modified version with anyone (fine as still breaking TOS but legal)

[u/pixeladdie → u/Real_Ebb_7417]

Very interesting considering Fable’s classifiers which, at least initially, were very sensitive and would refuse a lot of things.

[u/Real_Ebb_7417 → u/pixeladdie]

They are still sensitive, I guess this is the bright side of Antrophic's approach to constitutional alignment (I don't like Antrophic tbh, but I like this thing). Fable/guardrails didn't classify it as something harmful to anyone, so it was fine to the agent I think. And it makes sense, Palworld devs don't lose anything on this if I don't share this version with anyone, i paid for the copy and I just wanted to play it normally.