For programs, that is not a problem.
This is a problem for data.
Why? Because you very rarely need to read the program’s “content”, and when you do, you’ll instead go look at the source code anyways. But for binary data files there is no source code that is the equivalent of the contents in readable form.
If you want to read it as a human in your text editor, good luck with making sense of it. If you want to read it with your program it’ll have to pull in a tree of dependencies out of questionable necessity, and any of that dependencies could have a severe bug or a security vulnerability that affects your program and it’s users. And the only reason you needed to import that lib is to be able to parse this binary format. It’s not even a common one like an archive format, but a totally custom made format of systemd.
And then there’s another problem. You may be able to make sense of the binary data with your bare hands and a text editor, but you better not edit it that way, because you may mess up the delicate offsets, or you may wanted to replace a value (e.g. a string, out some kind of list) with a longer one but you can’t because of the former problem.
Binary is ok for programs, and you know what, it’s also fine for data in transit (network) and of course archives.
But for data, whether it’s a log file or configuration, or some other that would be totally fine in text format, it’s just annoying, limiting, and overcomplicated.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
So literally every program on your machine is obfuscated. Linux kernel? Obfuscated. Wayland? Obfuscated. And even VIM: obfuscated.
You’re creating problems where there are none.
Did you read my comment in it’s entirety?
For programs, that is not a problem.
This is a problem for data.
Why? Because you very rarely need to read the program’s “content”, and when you do, you’ll instead go look at the source code anyways. But for binary data files there is no source code that is the equivalent of the contents in readable form.
If you want to read it as a human in your text editor, good luck with making sense of it. If you want to read it with your program it’ll have to pull in a tree of dependencies out of questionable necessity, and any of that dependencies could have a severe bug or a security vulnerability that affects your program and it’s users. And the only reason you needed to import that lib is to be able to parse this binary format. It’s not even a common one like an archive format, but a totally custom made format of systemd.
And then there’s another problem. You may be able to make sense of the binary data with your bare hands and a text editor, but you better not edit it that way, because you may mess up the delicate offsets, or you may wanted to replace a value (e.g. a string, out some kind of list) with a longer one but you can’t because of the former problem.
Binary is ok for programs, and you know what, it’s also fine for data in transit (network) and of course archives.
But for data, whether it’s a log file or configuration, or some other that would be totally fine in text format, it’s just annoying, limiting, and overcomplicated.
Again, that’s not what obfuscation means.
Also, what exactly is the difference between cat and journalctl? You can’t read a text file without a program either.
Of course, raw text files are more common, but what you’re drawing up here is a mixture of old man yells at cloud and tin foil hat territory.