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I don't know if it's because I skip most AI conversations, but I think you guys might have failed to discuss some things that have been happening for the last several weeks.
Reverse engineering with AI has gotten really, really good, somehow. It's so good that you can reverse engineer Microsoft Office and host it online for free. It's so good that you can submit your tokens to the Machine God and get World of Warcraft open source. You can now play the original Xbox Halo, but with 32 player coop (seemingly most of the players being Mexican). On your Nintendo 64. In fact, you can play Halo in your browser now. You can play lots of stuff in your browser now. I looked up an old game called Apeiron for old Macintosh, released in 1990 something, just a Centipede clone developed by Ambrosia Software, long since abandonware. There are two ports of it that I found in comments sections on Macintosh Garden. The classic decompilation site is shutting down due to sheer volume. And yes, there's also mods. Flying my Banshee across the Mojave almost makes me wish for a nuclear winter. My Foundry in Warcraft 3 just told me that my AWP research has completed, so I went on a tear across Lordaeron.
On the other side of this, AI can now shut down 70% of the Internet. This bug was in PHP for a long time, and only now discovered, because someone pointed a technological superweapon at it.
What the hell even happens from all this? Can Apple really continue to have a closed ecosystem? Are we going to wake up with no money in our bank accounts? Does proprietary code even exist anymore? How is Steam going to cope with having tens of thousands more games submitted to it? And why now? AI was good for several months up to now. Was it the release of tools that work with agents effectively? This seems a bit more significant than hundreds of mathematical proofs being published at once to me, especially because you can verify it works yourself, on your machine, and see the effects on the world right in front of you.
The economy and way-of-life of the first world as we know it might be ending. But at least we can play Bloodborne natively on PC.
I don't know about office but the games weren't reverse engineered, they were decompiled, as far as I'm aware anyway.
Presumably the solution will be some sort of run-time encryption, possibly combined with requirements of being online and some parts of programs running off-device?
And as far as I'm aware, decompilation is a kind of reverse engineering. You use Ghidra or some other decompiler and get the assembly code, and then you write something that does the same thing that the original functions did. The best ones might match byte-for-byte when compiled with the same compiler, but otherwise, a good goal is to get each function to output the same things given the same inputs. The guy who reversed Diablo seems to use the terms interchangeably.
Edited to add: on your solutions point, there is only so much you can do. Even without AI tools, Red Dead Redemption got cracked eventually, despite its DRM protections. You can always set up a server emulator or your own server, which happened with Club Penguin, and probably will happen with World of Warcraft.
Reverse engineering seems like the wrong word when the decompiled code essentially amounts to an extremely detailed instruction manual.
I'm not saying this isn't impressive, it's just that the office and Photoshop things seem much more like reverse engineering. Decompiling is something different.
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It's pretty different as used here though -- for one thing "super-decompiler" is pretty neat, but not nearly as impressive as "can code office from scratch"* in terms of broad applicability of the tech.
Decompiled software is also still covered by copyright, so while new forms of piracy are also pretty neat I don't really see much of a business impact here?
*More like "can code an office demo from scratch" AIUI at this point, but still pretty impressive
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