Python secure?

[Roger Binns]

Reid Nichol wrote:
> Roger Binns wrote:
>> Yes.  Anyone who recovers your "code" and/or uses it will be in
>> violation of copyright and several other laws.  That is legal
>> protection no matter what languages or combination of languages
>> you use.
>
> I assume you are talking about reverse engineering.  If so, that just
> depends on that particular countries laws.  Some allow and some don't.

The "uses it" bit is what is important.  Even in the European Union
where reverse engineering is legal, it is only legal for the purpose
of interoperability and where the original vendor provides no suitable
other means of doing the interoperability.

Anyone just taking your code, or even recovered code and then redistributing
it falls fowl of copyright laws (unless of course you GPL it :-)

But no matter what, there is nothing you can do to stop people finding
out the equivalent of your source code.  Having your program written
in a general purpose programming language on a general purpose operating
system for which there are numerous tools makes it easier.  It merely
takes one determined person.

And as a related anecdote, I reverse engineered Microsoft's RDP display
protocol several years ago in Europe using IDA Pro and SoftICE.  Not
only did I figure out how the protocol worked, but I also found several
bugs in their code :-)  The RDP client was written in C and C++ which
are generally considered the hardest languages to reverse engineer.

Roger