It rained, yesterday. For two hours, it rained. Not a monsoon rain, you. Not the I-can’t-find-a-raindrop but the-air-must-be-made-of-water sort of southeast Asia rain. No. A Rocky Mountain rain. Clean and pure. Bulging, heavy raindrops, cascading from the heavens above in a veritable deluge. Most unlike like the spit fire of a thousand Spitfires, being a million watery explosions of life. Of green. Of hope. Or Hope, if you will. But that tends to go more like HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOpe.
Heh. Forgive me. Are we still in High School? God, I hope not. Doing being “older and wiser” necessarily deny us access to juvenile fun? Again, god, I hope not. Hoooooooooooooooope not…
Ke ke ke. I crack myself up.
Well, speaking cracks… there was something else I DIDN’T crack today. The story goes something like this:
For the fun of it (see: because I’m so freaking 1337!!11) I installed Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition on my so-called server machine(a big thank you to everyone that contributed spare parts!). Heh. Obviously, I don’t exactly have a license for Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, so I was browsing around, attempting to find a crack (yes, I know. I’m a bad person. Yes, I know. I’m going to hell. It’s cool, though– Ken’s going along for the ride with me. I digress). I downloaded a couple … candidates, and noticed one (6k) that was suspiciously small. I thought to myself “gee, that file is way too small to actually be a legitimate crack (yes, I recognize the oxymoron). It’s probably spyware.” The smart person would have stopped there and deleted the suspicious file. Those of you know me know, of course, know that I am very, very smart. So my thought process continued: “Huh. Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out. *click*click* … uh. oh. no. NO! MAKE IT STOP!!!”
About five seconds after double-clicking, I discovered something nice about Windows Server 2003: it has built in Spyware detection. A nice little balloon popped up informing me that my computer was infected with spyware. Nice to know. I opened Windows Explorer to watch, with mounting horror (frantically pressing alt+ctrl+del), as my C:\\ directory literally filled with files and executables. By the time I punched the power switch, there must have been 30 different types of spyware installed. Sheesh.
*ahem* Needless to say, I’m typing this as I go through the process of setting up Windows Server 2003. … Again. =)
So, yeah.
To whoever gave me an extra $20 bill tonight: I am sorry for your mistake and loss. If I knew who you were, I would give it back to you.
To the gentleman who rejected your order last night because we did not bring you napkins: I bear you no ill-will. I enjoyed the pizza (that you did not want because we did not bring you napkins). Jerk. =P
Actually many crack files are quite small. Often all they often have to do is change a couple of bytes in an executable.
A quick way to check it to email the file to your free email account, like Yahoo. Most of them have scanners.
Usually, I would install (in theory) install the 90 day trial version which comes free with any of the certification books. Then I would find a crack to display the lock out.
Unsigned code is usually fairly easy to crack. Say you have some shareware program, in which the author has died, and there is no way you can pay even if you want to. You start the program in a debuggeer. It generally won’t have symbolds, so your going to have to get comfortable with assembly. Run the program until you get to the dialog box saying ‘Please pay for this program’, or some obvious check for a license. You then look at the stack.
Generally, as some point in the program they have some logic like this:
if check_license() == bad:
display_pay_me_message()
exit(1)
We’ll the ‘if’ statement will get changed into an assembler instruction from a conditional branch to an unconditional branch. This way it won’t even check the copy protection, and continue running the program. Lastly, you can create a ‘crack’ which will find an modify this bit for the rest of the world. It will only work for that exact build, as the assembly instructions will move around from build to build.
In the world of signed code, the entire executable will have a checksum applied to it, and when it starts up it will check if this checksum has been changed.
In this situation you have two steps. First, disable the check for the signed code, second disable the copy protection step.
Tougher programs to crack involve checking to make sure you didn’t disable the signed code check. The process continues, with programmers making it more difficult to disable, and hackers finding all those points and disabling them.
This is probably more than you wanted to know. Also, it won’t help you get any certification that I know of.
Why am I going to hell? … oh wait, if we are talking about… dude, I swear, I thought she was legal, that 4 year old looked 17, hand to god…
as to your previous book naming query: a tale of two cities. actually one of my more favorite dickens…
your favorite dickens… much like chemical weapons are my favorite weapons of mass destruction