The Effectiveness Of Bytecode Decompilation

High-level bytecodes used by object-oriented managed execution environments make it easy to decompile them. This paper studies the reasons that make bytecode decompilers such efficient and presents basic obfuscation techniques as an efficient protection against binary code reverse engineering.basic obfuscation, reverse engineering, object-oriented execution

Political tolerance in Eastern and Western Europe: Social and psychological roots

According to Sullivan et al.’s (Sullivan et al. 1979, 53-55, Sullivan et al. 1985) theory, social and\ud psychological factors play different roles in political tolerance. Target-group selection is shaped by\ud socio-demographic characteristics, since in this way people try to adjust themselves to their social\ud environment. On the other side, the degree of tolerance is a function of personality and other\ud psychological factors.\ud The paper examines whether the causal model proposed by Sullivan and his co-workers is able to\ud account for individual differences in the degree of political intolerance in Eastern and Western Europe.\ud The main emphasis is on their hypothesis about different effects of socio-economic and psychological\ud variables. The research is based on World Values Survey data, which include the so called ‘least liked’\ud method to operationalize political tolerance. The findings indicate that psychological factors play an\ud important role in the choice of target group, and not only in determining the degree of intolerance,\ud contrary to Sullivan et al., hypothesis. Socio-economic status variables displayed rather complex\ud pattern of influence on political tolerance. In general, the findings suggest that intolerance of different\ud groups is not uniformly related to social and psychological explanatory variables. Not only intolerance\ud is pluralistic, but the mechanisms behind intolerance seem to be pluralistic too

Five views: Is populism really a threat to democracy?

Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 US presidential election, the UK's decision to leave the EU, and the rise of anti-establishment parties across Europe have prompted discussions over the role of 'populism' in modern politics. But is populism really a threat to democracy or is the term simply used by mainstream politicians to dismiss the legitimate concerns of citizens? We asked five academics for their views

Body, Voice and Noise: Acting for Sound Films as Debated in the Interwar Romanian Press

Sound cinema arrived on Romanian screens in 1929 to a moderate response. Critics and artists alike pondered over their status as an altered version of silent cinema, filmed theatre or a new art form. All three alternatives were further confronted to the status of the actor, as delineated by theatre, in an attempt to clarify the uncertain future of the film actor who used both his body and voice. This paper conducts a survey of articles on these issues published by Romanian interwar newspapers. Their authors reached various conclusions, from predicting the imminent failure of sound cinema and, thus, the disappearance of the spoken film actor, temporarily subjected to enacting on celluloid a shadow of his defining stage performance, to examining solutions that conciliated spoken dialogue with the sound dimension of film

Screenwritten Spells: Portrayals of the Witch in Early Cinema

The reassessment of early films outside a teleological perspective on the evolution of cinema disclosed them as representing a form of late nineteenth century stage entertainment. Although defined by non-narrativity, catalogues of the era included a significant number of titles seemingly indicating literaryadaptations. Exploring the screenwriting practices of early cinema reveal them as making only limited references to famous literary works known to the audiences, by re-enacting key moments or famous scenes. The paper selects early films revolving around witchcraft in order to discuss the intertextual narrative construction of the witch archetype within the context of this cinema of reference

Orbán’s great power politics

Hungary’s parliamentary election on 3 April is set to provide the biggest challenge to Viktor Orbán’s hold on power since he became Prime Minister in 2010. Zsolt Enyedi reflects on Orbán’s recent ‘state of the nation’ speech, which kicked off the 2022 election campaign and shed light on how the Prime Minister views Hungary’s position within Europe and the world