Frav,



first of all let me say that it is definately time some changes were made,

the site has definately begun overloading itself with information hedging on

mass redundancy



note that much of what i may write here may or may not be useful to what you

are envisioning, but all are my opinions and ideas even if they agree or not

with your plans



cracking essays as such: here is my app fravia, here is how i cracked it,

and please post it with the 4 million other ones

...are definately good for the archives, but we have enough of them for many

new generations to be able to learn from without having to play the game of

'you changed your protection this week and so we deprotect it again next

week' etc...



my first thought is that not much more in the way of guidelines shold be

set, people have a tendency to come up with ideas that, if given too many

rules, will be difficult to impart, often the way of a bureaucratic society

(sorry ma'am but i dont care if your program will fix our server, you must

get it approved in triplicate by the department heads who built it, complete

with documentation and critiques by at least three doctoral candidates who

share your opinion. Incidentally, the guys in charge of original programming

take major offense at someone who claims there are problem areas, but thats

okay they will be back from their golf trip in New Zealand in the first week

in March when you can post your rough draft of your changes to them for the

review board to decide if it is even feasible...) <--- hoops to jump through

can get a little tricky!



don't laugh, a friend of mine working in a banking firm on their intranet

has to fill out a work order any time he wants to change a single javascript

error - then wait until he gets the department's approval before he can make

the change...



but back to topic - what i am suggesting is make some headings like you have

done, and some sections like our old 'hcu projects' section



a topic in the 'general' section might be REALITY CRACKING, whereas the

section on more direct projects could be 'reprogramming winNT workstation to

become winNT server' (yes its been done this is just an example)



why both? because many people who are good at problem solving are not as

good at coming up with problems to solve as they are at solving them, and

some people come up with topics on their own quite easily.



here is something i was thinking as well, a 'how to write tools of our

trade' section

too much to deal with? too broad a topic? who knows, as i said - its just an

idea



also, i love the idea of increased functionality programming (again using

examples we have seen)

like 'adding a save function to IDA or SoftICE' and such - basically

increasing the usability of an application (hence helping the programmer and

the user of the program at the same time)



maybe a forum of 'what i would like to see a program be able to do' so that

people would have assignments they could work on and accomplish for the

benefit of many



please let me know if there is anything else i missed that you would like

feedback on as i am always available for comment



* * *



mammon - heres an idea, a one way dongle...



basically this idea is a dongle that doesnt actually send data back to the

program at all, or bogus data so it appears to be a normal dongle, possible

even having a code section that really is older cheesy dongle code that

really does something



BUT



apply some of the old self modifying code techniques, and so when the

program calls the dongle, it overwrites some of the program in ram with new

code that does entirely different operations (without the dongle the program

will be missing calls and entire sections of functionality that unless you

have the full app with dongle, no hint that other functionality even exists

is evident)



the SMC could overwrite completely several parts of the program including

the old dongle stuff in place of newer more effective methods



again - just an idea :)



+gthorne