alt Hacker NewsSpeaking as a hardware engineer, the moat did not vanish. You have simply assumed you were on the right side of the moat this whole time when in reality you dug half a trench and threw a glass of water in it.
If your firmware is open for someone to reverse engineer now, it has always been open. The real moat is firmware security, encryption, secure locked down hardware. Nobody, not even LLMs, can reverse your firmware if they can't obtain a cleartext copy of it.
You must use microcontrollers with security features, encrypted firmware, secure key stores. If you don't, you never had a moat in the first place. Your only security is the belief that it's too much effort to reverse your product. Security through obscurity is the moat that has vanished and everyone has been screaming for decades that this is not secure by any stretch of the imagination.
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Reverse engineering of audio effects can be done completely independently of the hardware that generates it.
I think you are torturing the analogy.
A moat isn’t a perfect defense. It’s a delay tactic that keeps the enemy from coming right up to your wall and climbing it or breaking it down. While you defend your moat, you whittle down the attackers so even when they do cross it they can be more easily defeated.
Moats and high walls became obsolete when canon fire became common.
Claude isn’t just a faster way to cross the moat, it’s gunpowder, and with it the rules have fundamentally changed.
Firmware security is useless if your product can be bought tested and reverse engineered through multiple trials. So long as you have something that can be understood and used by humans, you have something that can be reverse engineered.
Having the code accessible makes it easier, but just having both input and output is sufficient.