* Posts by A J Stiles

2669 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2006

Beam me up, Scotty, And VAPORIZE me in the process

A J Stiles
FAIL

Pointless

At the age of about seven or eight, I invented a process for making message cassettes which could only be listened to once; by unscrewing the cassette shell after rewinding, inserting a small piece of loudspeaker magnet in the tape path just before the take-up spool and then reassembling.

An hour or so later, I had invented a process for defeating my "one-time play" cassettes. Because one playing is all it takes, if there is another recorder plugged into the earphone socket of the first .....

Wheels fall off bid to sue Apple over iTunes anti-piracy shenanigans

A J Stiles

Re: They're suing the wrong company

But RealNetworks were in the same position as Apple, and couldn't get the authority to distribute DRM-free files. So they exercised their legally-protected right to interoperate with the Apple iPod, by persuading it to play their own DRM-encumbered files.

Now, obviously this required some hacking. However, this almost certainly did not exceed the bounds of "reasonable force" -- which is your right, when someone is blocking you from doing something which the law of the land says you are allowed to do and keeps ignoring polite requests. And bear in mind that in some states of the USA, you can actually legally pull a gun on someone who is calling you names, so RealNetworks must have plenty of wiggle-room. And proper old-fashioned tinkering with files is a lot less potentially harmful than, say, kidnapping and torturing an Apple engineer to get them to tell you how to get your media files to play on their player.

It also raises serious questions about the way that Apple's and RN's DRM schemes were sold, if the work-around was so easy to pull off. The Record Labels were evidently sold a pup. If it was known back in the days that copy-prevention was mathematically impossible rather than just very difficult (I've said this all along, but never actually bothered with a proper, formal, rigorous proof, as it's so self-evident.)

It might be intetesting, if the record labels (who might legitimately be expected not to be as intimately acquainted with matters of esoteric mathematics as a computer company hiring advanced mathematicians) successfully sued Apple, Microsoft, RealNetworks, Cactus et al for selling them DRM schemes they must have known would not work.

A J Stiles

The damage is done anyway

It doesn't even matter too much if the case is dismissed without prejudice. There is clearly a case for Apple to answer, if only somebody brings it. Apple exceeded their authority to sabotage RealNetworks' attempts to build an interoperable system; by breaking one law (tampering with someone else's property) and misusing another (claiming legal protection for their own unfair practices; copyright law specifically allows for interoperability).

Even worse for Apple, in the mindset of the general public, only the guilty get off on technicalities. And if someone is already "guilty enough" in the public mind, even "I didn't do it" is a technicality; so "you weren't actually the one who got hurt" are mere weasel-words.

Looking at the bigger picture, DRM on music is dead, buried and its grave resembles the site of a pop festival. No sensible manufacturer is going to get involved with it now. The future is open and interoperable, and the buying public know what they will and won't put up with.

Renewable energy 'simply won't work': Top Google engineers

A J Stiles

Then we're fucked

Non-renewable energy sources will run out sooner or later, by definition.

If renewable energy sources can't meet our needs, then our needs are simply going to end up unmet.

It really is that simple.

'How a censorious and moralistic blogger ruined my evening'

A J Stiles

Oozing Polonius

Polonius was certainly oozing after Hamlet stabbed him through that curtain .....

GOTCHA: Google caught STRIPPING SSL from BT Wi-Fi users' searches

A J Stiles
Holmes

Re: Like opening your mail

Back in the days when the postal service was set up, yes, you wouldn't have expected them to read the mail they were supposed to be delivering.

But things have changed

If they were setting up the postal service nowadays, it would be free to post a letter anywhere in the world; but they would reserve the right to read your mail and insert advertisements. Because that's the way the world works now: The new postal service exists for the purpose of displaying advertisements, and the delivery of letters and parcels is just a serendipitous side-effect. All services nowadays are just means to an end, and that end is Targeted Advertising. Marketing departments want to be able to show you advertisements that are likely to match something you were already going to buy anyway, so they can pretend to their paying customers that they successfully persuaded you to buy it. And in order to do this, they need to gather as much information as possible about you.

Of course, the cost of all this advertising is added to the price you end up paying for the product .....

Philae healthier: Proud ESA shows off first comet surface pic

A J Stiles
Boffin

Re: Where are the frickin' laser beams when you need them?

The only thing that keeps water liquid on the surface of the Earth is about ten tonnes of air pressing on every square metre. Something that hasn't even got enough gravity to mould itself spherical is a bit unlikely to be able to keep much of an atmosphere round itself.

When ice is warmed under a sufficiently low pressure or vacuum, it changes straight to steam without bothering to pass through water.

Look up "Triple point" and be enlightened :)

A J Stiles
Coat

Re: Difficult to tell

I'd crouch down behind a rock, and boldly go where no-one had gone before .....

Google begins to roll out Lollipop to Nexus devices

A J Stiles

Re: Nexus 10 as well

I'll take it off your hands, if you don't want it .....

Bouncy bouncy: Comet probot Philae landed twice

A J Stiles
FAIL

Re: I do think that the press coverage of all this is a tad light.

Most people could care less about anything factual or actually interesting.
The ability to care less about something implies that one must already care about it to some fairly strong degree. Surely what you really mean is, "most people could care more about anything factual or actually interesting".

'Yes, yes... YES!' Philae lands on COMET 67P

A J Stiles

Re: Accuracy

Oh, now you've got me wanting to finish the calculation .....

Right. Call Philae 1m by 1m., and call the comet 3 km. by 4 km. That gives Philae 12 000 000 times its own area to land in. If the ratio of areas is 12e6:1, then the ratio of diameters will be about 3400:1. So making the bullet 866 picometres across. About a single atom, then.

Or, at full scale: Landing a washing machine within the city boundary of Derby, from 3.5 times as far away as the Sun.

A J Stiles
Pint

Accuracy

The comet is about 4 km. wide, and about half a terametre from Earth, so it subtends an angle of 8 nanoradians.

By my back-of-the-fag-packet calculations, that's equivalent to firing a gun from London and hitting a target in Paris 3 micrometres wide.

Net neutrality, Verizon, open internet ... How can we solve this mess?

A J Stiles

Forbeared?

Forborne, surely.

(Bigger question: What's the past tense of "beware" ?)

What kind of generation doesn't stick it to the Man, but to Taylor Swift instead?

A J Stiles

This is the future

Until the 19th Century, the only source of a stable purple dye was a rare shellfish imported from the Middle East. Then a young chemist by the name of William Henry Perkin accidentally invented Artificial Mauve. Suddenly, everyone could afford to wear purple -- but the cash value of the shellfish that had been the sole source of purple dye plummeted.

My contention is, making music is no longer a viable means of earning a living.

When the distribution of music was limited by technology to radio stations and record companies, who effectively controlled the price, you could earn a living singing. The Internet has played Perkin to the former music distributors' shellfish merchants.

If you don't like the idea of people listening to your music without paying you as much for it as you want, then use the only weapon you have. Withdraw your labour! Go on strike! Stop making music!

Maybe someone will listen to that .....

Fridge-size probot headed for comet touchdown

A J Stiles

Re: In space no one can hear your sonar

I think you'll find that sound travels pretty well through rock .....

MoD releases code to GitHub: Our Ideaworks... sort of

A J Stiles

Re: Fecking GPL

When Windows and Office come under a permissive licence, you might have a point.

The whole idea of the GPL is to ensure that the fruits of human endeavour belong to as much of humanity as possible, by preventing the growth of subtly-incompatible, closed-source forks. What reason could anyone possibly have for opposing the use of the GPL, beside wanting to create their own closed fork of someone else's project?

Words to put dread in a sysadmin's heart: 'We are moving our cloud from Windows to Linux'

A J Stiles

Re: Don't go Windows, and if you do, keep your options open

But the common Enterprise Linux versions like Redhat and Suse actually cost more than Windows Server to license.
I'm intrigued ..... What exactly does Red Hat or SuSE do, that Debian doesn't? And which components of the stack have ongoing costs beyond the up-front cost? (Apache, MariaDB, Asterisk, Exim, all the popular Open Source programming languages -- none of them have per-processor or per-client licencing costs).

Aereo-no! Streaming telly biz axes staff, shuts down operations

A J Stiles

Re: But that's not how it worked

The question is, though, is it rebroadcasting? The stream is meant for only one client. And if it is, then is the ultra-long antenna downlead to which it is functionally equivalent, rebroadcasting? And if not, what's the difference? Do you only cross a line when you provide remote TV reception as a service to someone else?

"I'm not paying to advertise to people in distant cities who won't buy my wares" -- but you haven't lost anything even if they do watch the programmes you paid for, it's not as though they have prevented anyone else from seeing your advertisements. And, unlike the case of someone downloading music without paying for it, the chances are if they do ever visit your stamping-ground, then they might buy something they saw advertised -- not like someone who has no reason to buy something they already acquired for free.

A J Stiles
Holmes

Well, this was bound to happen

Their business model is providing a connection between an antenna in one city, and a receiver in another. The idea being that by making use of their service, you can receive a transmission that you would not ordinarily be able to pick up.

On the face of it, this is hardly any different from you installing a very long cable and repeater amplifiers to connect your set to that out-of-area aerial. Of course, in the digital age, you could use a suitable server with the right hardware to demodulate and demultiplex the signal at the far end, and send the resulting stream of zeros and ones over the existing infrastructure of the Internet. You just need to reconstruct the images at your end.

Now, since the signal is digital, all your server really has to do is shunt bits around more or less verbatim, from a USB tuner to the Ethernet port; all it needs to do is add an overhead so predictable it hardly takes any time to compute it. Even a modestly-specced server will have more than enough grunt to do that all day long, from many tuners; so there are definite economies of scale to be made. Meaning, it becomes a service for which you can charge money.

Of course, since they wouldn't have a job in the first place otherwise, it seems reasonable at first sight for the TV companies broadcasting the signals to those remote antennas that they should expect a cut of the profits. But the TV companies wouldn't have charged you, the viewer, a penny to watch their programmes from closer up to where they were broadcast. See the paradox?

The thing is, "free-to-air" TV isn't really free. It's paid for by advertising. The idea is that eventually the viewers buy things that were advertised on TV, and the money they bring in pays for the advertisements, and the money earned by the TV company from the advertisements pays for the bait -- i.e., the programmes that fill the breaks between advertisements.

One person stringing a cable from coast to coast across the USA to watch out-of-state TV probably wouldn't raise an eyebrow. But when there are a lot of people doing it, suddenly that's a lot of advertisements that are going to be viewed by people who, for purely geographical reasons, are never going to buy the products and services advertised. Which means that they are watching the programmes in between, without ever paying for them as would viewers in the intended catchment area.

And that, ultimately, is what the TV people really have a problem with. It's basically the same mentality that lets unsold food rot while homeless people starve, only at least nobody died of missing a TV show.

Deloitte's dumb rules stop us from telling you about everyone else's dumb rules

A J Stiles

Requisitions

Ever run out of order forms, and then tried to get some more order forms out of the stores without a proper order form?

I kept blank order forms stashed all over my last workplace, having been bitten once by this particular bureaucratic buried spade.

Mobile coverage on trains really is pants

A J Stiles

Known this all along

If you sit just outside first class, where you can pick up on the wi-fi spillage, your connection really is not much better than 2.5G at the best of times -- and most of the time, it just disappears altogether.

FTDI yanks chip-bricking driver from Windows Update, vows to fight on

A J Stiles

We have a word for this sort of behaviour in the U.K.

Or, rather, two words. "Criminal damage".

Lies, damn pies and obesity statistics: We're NOT a nation of fatties

A J Stiles

By definition, 1 kcal = the amount of energy required to make 1 kg. of water, 1°C hotter. About 4.2 kJ.

Trips to Mars may be OFF: The SUN has changed in a way we've NEVER SEEN

A J Stiles

Radiation Cooling Has Been Done Before

Radiation cooling has been done before; back in the days of valve electronics, electrodes used to get hot. Look at the anode of any power audio pentode or rectifier diode valve (and note that all the energy that goes through the output stage, which might contain two or more valves, must go through the power supply), and you will see extra metal for radiating away this heat. Some pentodes even have additional radiators on the grid2 support rods, because the second grid can carry a fair current.

'Urika': Cray unveils new 1,500-core big data crunching monster

A J Stiles

Re: They call this progress?

That always struck me as a bad advertisement -- the CRAY-1's resemblance to a bench seat implies that the computer is not so fast that you would not have time to sit down while it came up with the answers.

Facebook, Apple: LADIES! Why not FREEZE your EGGS? It's on the company!

A J Stiles

Next: Immortality

I fully expect that as soon as a viable immortality treatment is available, it will be offered as part of some tech company's private medical care package -- free, as long as you continue working for the company that is providing it.

Radiohead(ache): BBC wants dead duck tech in sexy new mobes

A J Stiles

Re: Follow the money

I'm not sure it is about the money here, so much as it is about keeping undesirables off the airwaves.

Any schoolchild can (and, back in the day, they used to) build a MW or LW receiver. Building a transmitter is a little harder, but still do-able. It gets more complex when you need to do FM, but it's still nowhere near beyond the bounds of practicability.

Digital broadcasting, on the other hand, requires access to proprietary technology. And while the receiving chips may be given away to encourage manufacturers to make (a\nd, therefore, consumers to buy) receivers, you can bet your arse that Fred in the Shed won't be allowed anywhere near the parts required to build a transmitter.

Snapchat 'hack' pics mostly clothed user snaps, odd bits of legacy pr0n – report

A J Stiles

Is anybody really surprised?

When you rely on proprietary technology to do something, then you surrender control over it.

When you are relying on proprietary technology to do something that is demonstrably mathematically impossible, then there is no way it's going to end well.

OMG! With nothing but machine tools, steel and parts you can make a GUN!!

A J Stiles

Re: @ A J Stiles

O.K. Name some property that you consider worth more than your life.

A J Stiles

t might also be worth noting that, as gun-control advocates claim, it is rare for civilian US gun owners to use their weapons legally against criminals (for instance in "home defence" scenarios). However there are between 200 and 300 justifiable homicides of this kind every year, a number not so very much lower than the fatal shootings accounted for by law-enforcement types acting in the line of duty.
Taking a life in response to a property crime is never justifiable under any circumstances. Life is unconditionally worth more than property. Your property is worth less than the life of the burglar trying to steal it. Always.

A moment of brilliance? UPnP for Internet of Stuff lightbulbs

A J Stiles

Re: Making things simple

Many of the UK "withheld" cold callers now poll using a recorded message which cannot distinguish an answerphone from a real person. It relies on a human to press a digit to signify your interest in their spiel. That either connects you to their call centre - or tells you someone will ring you back.

The latter's callback is always a British accent - but still with "withheld". They then blithely argue that they are allowed to ignore OFCOM's proscriptions on recorded polling messages, withheld numbers, and TPS numbers. If you try to elicit their company name they ring off immediately.

Then you need to block withheld numbers. Either with a well-configured Asterisk -- use ZapATeller() to trigger their answering machine detection, and maybe play them some Kevin Bloody Wilson -- or by paying your telco for the privilege.

There is absolutely no excuse for anybody to call from a withheld number. Ever. If somebody knows my number, then I have a right to know theirs. It really is that simple.

BBC Trust candidate defends licence fee, says evaders are CRIMINALS

A J Stiles

Re: hah keep it !!

There are *no* advertisements on the BBC. That is kind of the point.

A J Stiles

Missed Opportunity

I fully support the TV licence system as the best way of keeping the BBC advertisement-free.

However, think they missed an opportunity to sort out the problem of TV licence evasion once and for all with the digital switchover.

Why wasn't it mandated that every digital TV receiver must have a smartcard reader, from Day One? Then the BBC channels could simply have been broadcast scrambled, requiring a viewing card to watch or record them. No payment, no pictures. Simple!

It would have altered the payment model from per-address to per-device; but I don't see a problem with a person who lives alone swapping their viewing card from one receiver to another as they move from room to room.

It's time for PGP to die, says ... no, not the NSA – a US crypto prof

A J Stiles

It's hard for a reason

Using PGP properly is hard -- for a reason.

If you get any of the practical implementation details wrong, you can end up with a product that looks secure but isn't. Nobody wants to be selling that product.

Private keys have to be kept secret. You can't afford for there to be any way to leak a private key. Public keys aren't secret, but have to be verifiable; otherwise, you can't be sure some public key you've downloaded really belongs to that person, and not someone else who has the real public key, their own keypair and access to messages in transit and so can decrypt the message and re-encrypt it against the real public key.

By forcing you to use your own back-channel for key verification, which you can be reasonably sure is beyond the reach of a bent keyserver operator, the implementers can avoid that issue.

Unfortunately, that by definition makes it hard to use, for want of the very integration that makes for ease of use. But anything you did to make it easier to use would end up potentially compromising the security of the system -- maybe not now, but maybe in future, in some combination of circumstances that did not occur to the implementer at the time.

There are two fundamental limitations that you run into. These aren't limitations of technology, that will be solved with the right invention; they are limitations of the universe, that cannot be overcome by any amount of ingenuity.

(1) When you have several channels *in series*, the overall trustworthiness is determined by the *least* trustworthy link in the chain. But when you have several channels *in parallel*, the overall trustworthiness is determined by the *most* trustworthy among them.

(2) Anybody can build a cryptosystem that *they* can't crack. That absolutely doesn't mean *nobody* can crack it. You need rigorous mathematical proof of uncrackability.

Crypto software unavoidably has to trust the user not to do anything stupid; but if it trusts no-one else, then it's as trustworthy as the user. Making it easy for the user to do stupid things (such as exposing keys to tampering via the clipboard of an untrusted GUI, where any rogue application could read a private key or substitute a public key) potentially renders it less trustworthy.

Anything that's worth doing is going to be hard, and unfortunately the corollary is also true.

A J Stiles
Facepalm

Re: Not saying PGP is perfect

The whole point is that you don't *have* to trust the key server, or any server in the e-mail chain.

Vulture 2 spaceplane autopilot brain surgery a total success

A J Stiles
Linux

Andrew Tridgell and Skype ?!

I hope this particular combination bears fruit.

Microsoft compliance police to NHS: We want your money

A J Stiles

Remember Ernie Ball

The NHS would do well to remember the tale of Ernie Ball and his "ten thousand abacuses" comment.

My suggestion is to do the following:

1. Have the NHS petition for the annulment of copyright in all Microsoft products they are currently using. If the USA can retroactively and in defiance of their own written constitution assert claims for copyright over works which have passed into the Public Domain, then Britain can retroactively place into the Public Domain copyrighted works which are the subject of ongoing lawsuits.

2. Use the time thus bought to begin a complete migration to Open Source software.

The NHS is a big enough organisation to have its own in-house IT department, which could then subcontract itself out to others during the slack periods which would inevitably follow such a move. This would create local jobs for local programmers, who would then contribute through local taxes directly into the local economy, Local employees tend to eat in local restaurants, drink in local pubs, buy goods in local stores and take their families to visit local tourist attractions -- and, by virtue of their gainfully-employed status, are not attracting the attention of local law enforcement.

Of course, it would be essential to take a holistic approach to such a task. A full ground-up systems analysis needs to be made, and procurement policies need to be written to ensure that equipment purchased in future must be sufficiently well documented to enable interoperation with an Open Source infrastructure -- which means first and foremost no obscure, proprietary file formats; all data must be stored in a way that allows any sufficiently-competent programmer to extract and manipulate it. At the same time, a full workflow study woukd enable the identification of shortcomings in the existing proprietary products and suggest improvements to be made in their eventual replacements.

I am not saying this would not be an enormous task; far from it. But in the long term, it's got to be better for everyone if we keep money circulating in the local economy, instead of sending it abroad to enrich foreign billionaires.

Maplin Electronics sold for £85m to Rutland Partners

A J Stiles

Re: Vouchers

That would be CASHTEL -- Computer Assisted SHopping by TELephone.

You just needed a modem, a terminal emulator and a credit card. And somehow I got let loose with all three .....

TrueCrypt considered HARMFUL – downloads, website meddled to warn: 'It's not secure'

A J Stiles

Re: Hmm .....

Looks like patching from where I'm sitting .....

A J Stiles
Holmes

Hmm .....

I smell an attempt by a proprietary software vendor to discredit Open Source software.

Would they resort to this sort of tactics? Undoubtedly.

I'm keeping an ear out for what the OpenBSD folks have to say about this. They are one of the few development teams I trust, and they don't distribute crap; if something isn't fit for OpenBSD, then they either patch it or drop it.

Help. Mailing blacklists...

A J Stiles

Don't

Don't. E-mail is dying in the water anyway. Within five years, it will be unusable thanks to the spammers and the hackers. There will be private e-mail server appliances for communication within offices, but that's about all.

If you want to communicate with people, you need a mobile app. Someone will put out a cross-platform Open Source construction kit, sooner or later, that will enable the creation of mobile apps that basically retrieve data over http that you might once have e-mailed ;and display it, with good integration to the phone's applications such as mapping and phone calls, very easily (address object with direct integration to the phone's address book, latitude and longitude properties, and direct map access methods; telephone number object with validate and call methods); most of the bits are already there.

In future, instead of, say, e-mailing a spreadsheet of sales leads to your customers, you will publish something like a stack of vCards, each with addresses that can be called up on the map and phone numbers that can be dialled with a single touch; and the app to retrieve and make use of the data will be automatically generated, for whatever target architectures you select, along with the database schema and the customisation of scripts for the server. And if the phone app just happens to write a .CSV file to the SD card, so much the better .....

Europe's shock Google privacy ruling: The end of history? Don't be daft

A J Stiles

Re: Ken Hagan

Publishing details of a spent conviction would surely be contempt of court, though; even if the material were deemed not to be libellous because it were true?

A J Stiles

A fine line

There is a fundamental, irresolvable conflict between the right to know and the right to keep secrets.

Ideally, there would be circumstances in which a person should be obliged to make decisions as though they did not know some fact. So the offence would be committed not by, for example, looking up a spent conviction of a job applicant; but in using that knowledge to discriminate against them. In real life, it's impossible temporarily to forget something, and that knowledge might very easily influence someone's judgement.

This is exactly the sort of thing that it is proper for the courts to decide.

Reg probe bombshell: How we HACKED mobile voicemail without a PIN

A J Stiles

Re: haha

Yep! If you take out a SIM-only contract with "unlimited" text messages, stick your SIM into something loike an OpenVox G400E and start sending text messages, you will soon find out just how unlimited "unlimited" really means .....

A J Stiles

Re: Come on, it's not hard

When you have an ISDN30 (thirty B-channels and a D-channel), you get 30 numbers with it; but those numbers are not locked to individual B-channels. Anyone else who dials any one of those numbers will send a call up some available B-channel, and you can identify a call going down any one of those 30 B-channels as any one of those 30 numbers.

You change your CLI by means of D-channel messages (in Asterisk, the dialplan command is Set(CALLERID(num)=.....)), but BT will only let you identify as a number that actually belongs to you.

I have never actually worked with ISDN2 lines, but would imagine it is at least broadly similar.

An analogue line doesn't give you any access to the D-channel (and there is no in-band signalling anymore; it was the advent of ISDN that finally put an end to the Blue Box), so you can't change the CLI.

A J Stiles

Come on, it's not hard

On the BT landline network, you are definitely only allowed to use caller IDs that belong to you. I happen to know this because we once had two ISDN30s; and due to an administrative cock-up, they were ordered in two different names. So the presentation number ranges we had paid for were effectively locked to one or other of the line groups.

So our Asterisk was asking for what should have been a permitted ident; but if the call happened to get routed over the wrong line, then the ident got silently dropped, with the call coming through as anonymous.

This was, as you can imagine, a 'mare to troubleshoot. It only even became obvious when we started running afoul of anonymous call barring services even despite supposedly setting an ident on every outgoing call .....

All men are part of a PURE GENETIC ELITE, says geno-science bloke

A J Stiles

But .....

It's already possible to produce baby mice by using genetic material taken from a female mouse to fertilise a mouse egg. Humans aren't sufficiently different from mice for the same technique not to Just Work, if tried in humans -- the only thing standing in the way, is those pesky ethics boards.

So, we could still see an all-women society -- and I'm not even sure that would be such a bad thing.

(Before any insecure men downvote me, I am absolutely not suggesting that any of you need die of anything but old age to bring this about.)

OnePlus One equals 'killer' new mobe running CyanogenMod

A J Stiles

Re: Lack of SD + KitKat 4.4 == good idea...?

If someone whose primary business was getting rid of mice started a sideline renting out houses, it's a rather safe bet that those houses would not have cat flaps .....

A J Stiles

Re: Like, oh, 95% of the people on the planet

They don't have to do that unless they want to sell their phones in the USA. Mathematical operations aren't patentable in civilised countries.

Boffins claim machines now beat humans at face-matching

A J Stiles

Abstract Mathematics

I find this interesting, but for a different reason.

Face recognition is just a special case of shape recognition. And the abstract mathematics underlying shape recognition is the same as the abstract mathematics underlying decompilation -- "this vertex belongs to this shape" is isomorphic with "this instruction belongs to this loop".

It surely can't be long now before someone comes up with a program that, given a compiled binary, produces some Source Code that will compile to the same binary. That is going to be the game-changer .....