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"We [science fiction writers] always wanted to believe in "private sector" space -- hucksters make better characters than a government does."
- Larry Niven
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| Vivisector | ||
| A program that takes another computer program apart, while it's running, to see what it does. |
| Vivisector was an object program she'd borrowed from Tony just the other day... a tasty little routine going the rounds among young hackers that disassembled other programs and put them back together again without leaving a trace - even while those programs were running. Carefully, Clair sicked Vivisector on her mother's watchdog. Soon its guts were laid out across her inspection screen. |
| From Earth,
by David Brin. Published by Bantam in 1990 Additional resources -
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Are there tools like this in existence now? It is somewhat similar to a decompiler, which seeks to reverse the process by which human-readable code is translated into machine-executable code.
This sounds to me like something I would like. I'd like to know every program that is running on my computer, and what it is actually doing, in graphically clear terms. I know there are utilities that will tell you what applications are running and how much processor time they use, but I don't think they are quite Vivisector.
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