On 3/31/07, tedd <tedd@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
At 3:33 PM -0400 3/30/07, <tg-php@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >Ah ok.. that makes a bit more sense. Even still.. anyone who's >going out of their way to program a bot to defeat your specific >CAPTCHA mechanism will probably notice the failure in testing. > >Unless you made a failure behave similar to a success but put them >in a situation where ultimately they still can't post messages or >access anything useful. > >I remember reading about either 3D Studio or Maya (one of the 3D >modeling programs) and their copy protection method. They, at one >point, made I guess an obvious segment of code for the software >pirates to 'crack' that appeared to have totally deprotected the >program. It turns out that it only sort of de-protected it. They >put in multiple mechanisms that were more subtle. The one I'm >thinking of apparently made it so that after 250 right mouse clicks, >it would render everything in lower and lower qualities of >rendering. Or not render at all. OR menus stopped working or >something. But it was something that wasn't obvious at all until >people really started using the pirated copy for a while. > >Tricky bastards. I love it. hah > >-TG Yeah, me too! In one of my applications, I put in a self-check for size. If anyone change a single byte, the program crashed.
This kind of protection is still used these days. A cracker could atleast use programs like SoftICE to temporaly change bytes. And then he only needs to find where that protection exists and break that too :)
In the old Apple days, I knew one developer who wrote a program that when it thought is was being altered initialized it's floppy -- it bit harsh I think. :-) I wrote one that when altered would continue working, but gave the wrong results. I was amused when people would contact me and complain about their pirated copy not working properly.
That's a good one :)
I wrote one, didn't mass release it, but if it detected alteration, it would send me an email telling me where it was and other specifics about the user. I thought that was kind of neat, but it violated privacy issues I wasn't comfortable with. However, I could have init their hard-drive if I had wanted. I wonder what affect that technique would have on pirating software. Oh well, enough off-topic chatter. Thanks for all the review and comments. Cheers, tedd
Yeah, privacy issues.... They suck.. LOL. You can only try to create programs that are unbreakable, not that send you information about the cracker. The nicest thing to do is just making applications that format ur HDD when changing a byte :) If a hacker just does a first try, then clean up the HDD :) Tijnema
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