ianmiller999

How does the computer know your 30 days are up? If I set reset the date to the day I installed a trial will it go back to 30 days or does it use some other method?

I am curious I do not want t know how to extend the period before anyone decideds to lock it.

mj

I have tried this myself with limited trials - i.e. uninstall and then re-install - it dont work , maybe its something written to the registry?

Like you I am also curious

ianmiller999

Out of curiosity I tried setting my date back and it recognised that I set my date back and told me to correct the date before I could use the programme.

boxst

Hello

They either write something encrypted to the registry or write to a sector of the hard drive and mark it "bad" in the FAT.

Steve.

mj

will defrag cure this?

Rob Walker

If you use one of those programs that you can get that saves the state of the registry you can run that before you install the program. Then run it again afterwards and see whats changed.

boxst

mj:

I haven't done this stuff for a long time. The technology we used to employ would not be effected by a de-frag or any other re-organisation of the disk.

The protected software also wouldn't work if you "backed up" the hard drive, you had to clone it for the protection to be taken across.

Steve.

IWatkins

Some software I write/support has some of this built in, not so much to protect the software from theft more to ensure that the users move to the upgrades.

However, we have a component that is used that uses multiple methods.

1. The installer itself records the date during installation to the registry, usually a location hard to find. The software checks the date when it is run and compares with this date to see if it is still within 30 days.

2. The date and number of days left to run is also written to the hard disk on every use of the software. This is usually in a sector marked bad. We tend not to use this method.

3. The date details are patched into a DLL used by the software. This is fairly clever as the writing of it still ensures the DLL can be used but without knowing where in the DLL it is written or how the encryption works it is very difficult to reverse this.

4. Sneaky one is to write the details into common windows components such as the standard bitmap files by using a method know as stenography. This writes the details into a BMP file but you wouldn't know looking at it. This is especailly clever as the last modified, last accessed date/times are reset after it happens so that it appears the file hasn't been touched.

5. A few other methods.

We generally use method 4 as it is fairly harmless and fairly difficult to notice/reverse.

I know that the commercial grade shareware/trial software components can be even more devious and are quite hard to crack.

Cheers

Ian

messiah

i have a utility somewhere that stops the "days remaining" counter of the trial program. Its not foolproof, but it mainly depends on how much you're using the program. I found if my computer crashed during the program then it had a tendancy to realize "it had been had"...

what would scooby do

don't they also use somethink like the crypserv service on win2k / xp etc