As social media becomes a more relevant aspect in the lives of humans around the world, companies like Snap Inc. which owns the popular application, Snapchat, and Facebook which owns Instagram are constantly competing to come up with the next best feature. This past year, Snap Inc. filed for public offering and hired Swiss engineer to help defend their products against copycats. Laurent Balmelli helped to co-found the startup Strong.Codes, a maker of tools that obscures software code and makes it harder for competitors to reverse engineer or take a part and copy the code. The startup was founded by a team of academics with expertise in cryptography and software protection. The company says on its website, “our goal is to make software piracy much more expensive and complicated.” The main feature of that Snap Inc. is trying to protect is their ability to create stories and the facial recognition features associated with taking photographs. Instagram has recently produced stories quite similar to Snapchat's feature.
Strong.Codes
Strong codes offers software protection against reverse-engineering through jailbreak detection, complex obfuscation techniques, improved tamper-proofing, and Multi-IDE, file-based configuration of protections settings based on the latest LLVM 3.9 which is information on the compiler infrastructure. Jailbreaking is the modification of a smartphone or other electronic device to remove restrictions imposed by the manufacturer or operator, e.g. to allow the installation of unauthorized software. Obfuscation is the action of making something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible. The code used by Strong.Codes is universal meaning that their solution works on all major software platforms, such as Windows, OS X, GNU/Linux, iOS, Android and others. It supports C/C++ and Objective-C, among other programming languages.
Using software like strong.codes to protect companies unique programs is necessary in today's technological world. As technology continues to advance, those with knowledge of computer science are going to be highly sought out to work to protect public social media companies.
Resources
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-08/snap-linked-to-swiss-startup-that-fights-product-copycats
- https://strong.codes/#home
- https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=jailbreak+
- http://releases.llvm.org/3.9.1/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
Copycats don't just exist in technology. Car companies copy one another and many fast food chains do so as well. My question is what do you think could be done about copycats in those areas?
ReplyDeleteI don't know if Copycats is a good idea or not... Because one of the major reasons Computer Science develops so fast and provides so many jobs to the society is that programmers are willing to share their code and information, not like some traditional firms which want to create an information barrier... Thus Copycats might not be a good influence to the industry, I think the companies should work on copyrights protection instead of hiding the code, what do you think?
ReplyDeleteI think that Snapchat has good reason to not share their technological advances with other companies. Other companies have legally been stealing Snapchat's business, and they need to make sure that their company stays profitable. I think Apple goes through some of the same issues, as they'll release a product, and several months later another company with release the same product that is different, but uses some of the same important technological features that made Apple's product so attractive.
ReplyDelete