{Spam?} [ale] (reasonably) mature GUI solutions in Linux

John Wells jb at sourceillustrated.com
Tue Sep 16 13:42:23 EDT 2003


One clever thing I've seen obfuscators do in the past is change class and
variable names to reserved words, so that the decompiled source will not
compile unless you go through by hand and change them.

I'm not sure how it gets away with this internally...I assume that at the
byte code level the reserved words are irrelevant...

Anyway, for relatively large projects, this is somewhat effective.  Of
course, a programmer can still go through and figure out what's going on,
but it'll make their life hell for awhile.

John

Jason Day said:
> No, it's worse than that.  Remember, even though java is compiled, it
> compiles to bytecode, which is then interpreted (ignoring the option of
> using a native compiler, of course).  The bytecode is easily converted
> back into source.



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