Oh hey, found an old comment:

I admire the concept behind Denuvo.

Programs bounce around between a ton of different code segments, and it doesn’t really matter how they’re arranged within the binary. Some code even winds up repeated, when repetition is more efficient than jumping back and forth or checking a short loop. It doesn’t matter where the instructions are, so long as they do the right thing.

The machine code still tends to be clean, tight, and friendly toward reverse-engineering… relatively speaking. Anything more complex than addition is an inscrutable mess to people who aren’t warped by years of computer science, but it’s just a puzzle with a known answer, and there’s decades of tools for picking things apart and putting them back together. Scene groups don’t even need to unravel the whole program. They’re only looking for tricky details that will detect pirates and frustrate hackers. Eventually, they will find and defeat those checks.

So Denuvo does everything a hundred times over. Or a dozen. Or a thousand. Random chunks of code are decompiled, recompiled, transpiled, left incomplete, faked entirely, whatever. The whole thing is turned into a hot mess by a program that knows what each piece is supposed to be doing, and generally makes sure that’s what happens. The CPU takes a squiggly scribbled path hither and yon but does all the right things in the right order. And sprinkled throughout this eight-ton haystack are so many more needles, any of which might do slightly different things. The “attack surface” against pirates becomes enormous. They’ll still get through, eventually, but a crack delayed is a crack denied.

Unfortunately for us this also fucks up why computers are fast now.

Back in the single-digit-megahertz era, this would’ve made no difference to anything, besides requiring more RAM for these bloated executables. 8- and 16-bit processors just go where they’re told and encounter each instruction by complete surprise. Intel won the 32-bit era by cranking up clock speeds, which quickly outpaced RAM response times, leading to hideously clever cache-memory use, inside the CPU itself. Cache layers nowadays are a major part of CPU cost and an even larger part of CPU performance. Data that’s read early and kept nearby can make an instruction take one cycle instead of one thousand.

Sending the program-counter on a wild goose chase across hundreds of megabytes guarantees you’re gonna hit those thousand-cycle instructions. The next instruction being X=N+1 might take literally no time, if it happens near a non-math instruction, and the pipeline has room for it. But if you have to jump to that instruction and back, it’ll take ages. Maybe an entire microsecond! And if it never comes back - if it jumps to another copy of the whole function, and from there to parts unknown - those microseconds can become milliseconds. A few dozen of those in the wrong place and your water-cooled demigod of a PC will stutter like Porky Pig. That’s why Denuvo in practice just plain suuucks. It is a cache defeat algorithm. At its pleasure, and without remedy, it will give paying customers a glimpse of the timeline where Motorola 68000s conquered the world. Hit a branch and watch those eight cores starve.

Denuvo duplicates code at random, so executables bloat into a Gordian knot.

Ah, so there’s a grain of sense in this. Shame about the aggressive irony in whinging about tone while throwing dull insults.

The money to be made on operating systems was power over platforms, back in Windows 98 times. That’s the whole reason the Xbox project emerged. They wanted to PC-ify consoles on the assumption they’d still own PCs. The project succeeded! The assumption, not so much.

I think MS barged its way into browsers because it already owned the desktop, and browsers were the next big thing, and barging was just how they did things. And they only integrated IE in the sense you could not uninstall it. Windows obviously still ran Netscape (and later Firefox), and the OS needing a browser is vastly different from the OS being a browser.

Why did you obliquely reference a different company doing a completely different thing? Microsoft did do something very similar on desktop - making Windows 8 tablet-centric. Nothing in XP or especially 98 has anything to do with mobile computing.

Yeah it’s almost like we were talking about something else entirely.

I’ll thank you not to refer to 2012 as “two decades ago.” Felt like I drank from the wrong grail, before double-checking when Windows 8 came out.

A decade ago this would have been exciting news for mobile computing.

Enough has changed that all I can think is, uuugh.

how many ways can you really communicate with a cell tower?

Analog encoding assigns each device in a cell its own frequency range.

Time-domain multiplexing assigns each device a fraction of a second to transmit.

Quadrature phase-shift keying alters the timing of a signal to convey data.

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing has each device transmit the same signal over P out of Q bands, such that each device’s signal can be reconstructed by knowing which bands it transmitted on.

There’s a fucking reason your phone is faster now than in 2010.

How cell phones work is ridiculously complicated. Going from analog, to time-domain shenanigans, to binary wizard math, is why you can watch 720p video and whine that it’s not 1080p.

Wait, I’ve seen this one before.

You don’t.

But when you eventually reinstall, because Ubuntu crossed the line, Mint is just Ubuntu without the bullshit.

Previously? Some schmuck changing all the windows to be left-handed, immediately before a long-term-support feature freeze.

Zero percent surprised by many other comments throwing shade at Ubuntu.

Just use Mint.

That’s cool and all, but I would have liked some numbers. What’s the ratio compared to other lossless compression methods?

If that’s not deliberate… wow.

Awesome, implement universal basic income.

If jobs don’t need people then people don’t need jobs.

Similarly, there is no such thing as “digital borrowing.” The concept is fundamentally impossible. It’s a copy.

Portugal, the Mamluks

Are they a cover band?

Hey great, can I have Read It Later back? Y’know, the local temporary bookmark thing you forcibly uninstalled to “upgrade” to a cloud service?

If the ultimate meaning is that neural networks need to continuously interface with reality, then no, a virtual environment is still an environment.

If the ultimate meaning is that computers can never think because meat is magic, fuck off.