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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know how this compares to IDA Pro ?

This has almost none of the important features of IDA Pro:

  - advanced interactivity (function boundary change, switch table options...)
  - stack pointer tracking and stack recovery
  - structure and enum definition, use in disassembly
  - compiler and static library recognition
  - an industry-standard decompilation plugin (Hex-Rays Decompiler)
  - support for quick scripting using a high-level interpreter language (IDC/IDAPython)

Panopticon is libre software. You can improve it and use it as basis for your own research on program analysis.

If you can afford an IDA Pro license and cost of plugins, does it matter?

Yeah, it matters. If this is better, I'll use this; if IDA is better, I'll use IDA. I'm not 100% sure I understand your comment.

Btw, most companies can afford an IDA license. It's pretty cheap compared to the salary of a developer, at least in the coastal US.

If your job can justify it, great, but mine can't. I want it for personal use and I can't justify it.

There's an evaluation version of IDA that's an older version and doesn't include 64-bit disassembly (just x86 and ARM IIRC), but it's free.

And is not available for my operating system.

What's your operating system? I usually run it under Wine on Linux without a problem.

OK, sure, but I still don't see how this is relevant to whether IDA is better than Panopticon.

If you have more time than money, here's a possible option:

  - Buy IDA Pro using a credit card
  - Find bug or two, submit to bug bounty [1]
  - Pay back credit using bug bounty money

[1] - https://www.hex-rays.com/bugbounty.shtml

If life were so simple, everyone would be doing it don't you think?

My friend's grandfather was an economist. When he was a little boy he saw a $20 bill on the sidewalk on a walk with with his grandfather. He pointed to it and said "Grandpa look someone dropped a twenty dollar bill! We will be rich!" His grandfather dismissed his enthusiasm and explained that if there was free money on the ground somebody would have picked it up by now.

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