Hello Michael,

MN> On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 06:08:39AM +0900, Ken Hilton wrote:
>> Does anyone know of a Ruby source code obfuscator that's reliable and
>> readily available?  If so, I'd appreciate a pointer to it (apparently, both
>> ruby-lang and rubygarden are down at the time of this posting so I can't
>> check for myself.)

MN> Take a look at bRuby. It can dump the interal node-tree and then load it
MN> again (as far as I understand it). No Ruby sourcecode anymore. See also
MN> the Exerb project. 
 
MN> http://bruby.sourceforge.jp/index.en.html

But this is easy to reverse. It does not much more then removing the
comment lines. You can traverse the sourcecode and sometimes get a much
more readable source code - because the output routine is able to do
correct indentation. So there could be one generic tool(!!) to crack
protected ruby code and this is the main problem. The heart of copy
protection is to make the cracking process so difficult that only a
few very very skilled programmer can crack your application and need a
long time to do this.

-- 
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 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
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