Rules and regulations for submission


Version January 1999
Dude, help me or I won't be able to publish your essay!

VERY IMPORTANT !

Please download this redFORMATTING MUSTER and use it, pasting your essay inside it. If I decide to publish, I'll eventually add my comments, after having read your essay (duh), you'll always be free to ameliorate or update your essay once published, provided you have used this muster, yet you should check thoroughly your work before sending it, else I promise you that you'll regret it.
Please DO NOT SEND ME ANY "obvious" cracks, I feel always uneasy in refusing to publish someone's work, but I will not publish useless cracks any more. This is a site for software reverse engineering, and cracking protection schemes is only a tiny part of it, albeit important to lure young bozos crackers on the correct (i.e. white or red) knowledge paths :-)
Once more: noone could care less about the kind of software you crack, what's important is the reversing method in itself, not the target you have chosen. Therefore, unless your work refers to one of the BASIC tools we have to use (softice, wdasm, IDA, other debuggers, resource editors, memory sniffers and so on, those essays are always welcomed), or unless your work refers to an extremely stupid protection , please send only cracks referring to WEIRD protection schemes or to protection schemes that have NOT yet been explained enough. And we would still prefer essays about general software reversing and crippled functions enabling. You dig it?

Feel free to work on any one of the +HCU projects... all relevant results will be collected and published
- Please don't send obvious cracks!
- Please remember that noone cares about WHAT you crack (with rare exceptions), software comes and goes and there are zillion of warez sites on the web to get it regged for free... the only important and really ever lasting thing of your work is the "reverse engineering" part

- If you use a lot of code, please explain the protection scheme first, clearly and deeply, hyperlinking the commented code
- Please don't forget, for your target, to state exactly its VERSION, its EXACT NAME AND WHERE TO FIND IT... (you are not +ORC... and we are not amused to have to seek the archies for very rare targets :-)
- It would always be better if you give an email address where people can reach you with feedback and questions (I'm not going to push messages around), yet if you really feel that you must, you may also send anonymously, in that case please don't forget to indicate which handle you would like
- Please CHECK yourself that your essay does not blow Opera's or Navigator's marges out (just look at it in Opera, if it looks good in Opera it will work with any other decent browser of this planet)
- Please spellcheck your text YOURSELF! (No vulgarities either, please, nor SuCh SilLy TExt, do use normal capitalization. Separate your paragraphs with blank lines. Make your message inviting to your potential readers)
- Please eliminate from wdasm code all useless parts ("a jump" instead of "a (c)onditional or (u)nconditional jump", "1" instead of "00000001", and so on, just do yourself the search and replaces, please)
- Please: LESS CODE! MORE EXPLANATIONS! A good essay does not need much code, (a very good essay does not need ANY code) and if you really need much code then EXPLAIN EVERY LINE! (and automagically you'll immediatly realize that you did not needed that much :-)

Question:

                "Hey! What the heck should I reverse engineer then?"

Answer:
                    * Demomakers' creations (graphic in assembly)
                    * Dongles (see Project3)
                    * CD-ROM bound (see Project4)
                    * Save disabled (See project6)
                    * Quivers (See for instance +ORC's 4.1 or Vizion's essay)
                    * Orwellian targets (See Project9)
                    * DOS/Protected/Unix reversing are WELCOME!
                    * Perl scripts and site-busting techniques

		    * And you may try your hand at reality cracking as well...
Feel free to send good commented essays, I'll publish them (if necessary slightly modified) if worthy, well documented and not vulgar... once more, please, don't forget to download this redFORMATTING MUSTER and use it, pasting your essay inside it.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS THE "INTUITION" PROCESS YOU HAVE FOLLOWED REVERSING YOUR TARGET

The actual crack is NOT very important... we all know how to crack protection schemes, once we find them.

So the real problem is mostly to land in the correct part of an overbloated code monstrosity, to understand some new anti-reversing tricks, to follow a lead inside the dark codewoods. By all means the purpose of our activity is NOT to give to the lusers a ready-made crack receipt... there are hundred of wannabye crackers that do just that all the time... if you are here because you need the crack for a given program you are at the wrong address... here you will only be able to learn how to do it yourself, and this requires some grey matter inside your skull, serenity and cogitation.

As master +ORC wrote once upon a time: you are going to learn a difficult art, not how to use ad nauseam simple techniques

So: New protections, unusual protections, funny undocumented functions, "hidden" or "concealed" activities of your targets... this is interesting: HOW DID YOU SUSPECT IT? HOW DID YOU FIND IT? And only then, eventually, you can also add how you did crack it...but this is the most banal and less interesting part of your essay, believe me.

The less code you use in your essay and the more explanation you give about the TRY AND ERROR methods you have followed the better for those that are reading you and that mostly DO NOT CARE AT ALL for the target you are cracking in itself, as strange as this may appear to you... as a matter of fact they want to crack (or to protect) completely different programs!
I wanna submit my essay, dammit!
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