Reverse engineering and hacking have been around since the early days of software development. As a matter of fact, stealing or replicating someone else's ideas has always been the easiest way of creating competitive products. There is, of course, a perfectly acceptable method of building on previous discoveries by others—and as long as the others don't mind, it works fine. Most inventors and researchers, however, would like to get credit and possibly a financial reward for their work. In simpler terms, they also have mortgages to pay and vacations to take.

By Alex Kalinovsky at InformIT.

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