On Sunday 22 Feb 2009, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote: > I had written a broadband dialer for sify (antidialer) some time > back. during this time, sify decided to change its dialer protocol > for unknown reasons and include some cryptography** in it. I wanted > to know if it would be legal to reverse engineer the dialer (not > necessarily disassemble it) or wireshark packets to analyze and try > to write an alternate dialer for the new protocol. I'm asking this > for the following reasons:
As far as I know India doesn't have any equivalent law to the DMCA, so there is nothing illegal in what you're doing. Since you're reverse engineering the protocol and not the application itself you should be even safer. And in the highly unlikely scenario that Sify sues you for doing that, you have the further safe haven of claiming that the software supplied by them was defective and you needed to do this in order to utilise their services on an OS of their choice. I'd recommend filing a ticket about the faulty Sify dialler in any case, so that you're doubly protected -- if Sify is not able to fix the problem in a reasonable amount of time you can sue them instead of the other way around :) On the other hand, I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, just my interpretation of the situation. If you do get arrested I'll not be held responsible, though I promise to send you pizzas in your cell :) Regards, -- Raju -- Raj Mathur [email protected] http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
