python obfuscate

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 4:00 PM, Joshua Landau <joshua at landau.ws> wrote:
> But I do warn that it's adding another abstracting step that
> doesn't improve - it probably harms - the overall usability of the
> product. Further, a determined hacker can circumvent it, much as they
> can circumvent everything else.

I had this argument with my boss at work about obfuscating our
JavaScript code. He said that he was extremely concerned that nobody
should be able to rip off all his code; I said that anybody could
still rip it off, just by using the code exactly the way the browser
would. The *ONLY* advantage you can possibly get from an obfuscation
system is that your users can't easily figure out what's going on
internally; they can still, by definition, run the program unchanged.

If you run obfuscated code through a prettifier (or a decompiler and
then a prettifier, as the case may be), you end up with something
that's practically indistinguishable from poorly-commented code. Sure,
it's not as nice to work with as something with helpful variable names
and comments, but it's far from impossible.

ChrisA