I don't see it as fetishizing byte count. I think of it as a proxy measure for how complicated or uncomplicated the exploit might be. They could just as well have said "we can do it in 3 lines of python" or "the Shannon entropy of the script implementing the exploit is really small" and I would have interpreted it similarly.
Where do you see this "fetishizing" happening most often? It's a strange thing to counter-fetishize about.
> I think of it as a proxy measure for how complicated or uncomplicated the exploit might be.
From a Busy Beaver, 256-bytes compo, or Dwitter perspective, 732 bytes isn’t really that meaningful.
And the sample exploit is even optimizing the byte size by using zlib compression, which doesn’t make much sense for the purpose. It just emphasizes the byte count fetishization.
Again, I think the point is that compressed size is a reasonable measure of the inherent complexity of a program. I'm a crap mathematician, but I believe that is a fundamental concept in information theory.
But it isn’t compressed size, the compressed part is only 180 bytes of the 732.
Ah, got it. Thank you.