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In the windows 9x days, software had direct access to hardware without needing any permission.

They could get very creative about where the trial end date could be hidden. They could write it to random blocks of the fat32 partition marked as "free". They could even find unallocated blocks outside of the partition table and write it there.

Or you could write it to the contents of a file without going though the regular file APIs, so it's modification date wouldn't change.

As long as just one copy of the trial end date stays intact, it can simply take the latest one.

which, it'll also stat() a bunch of "random" files (among other things)

I had a case of a program that had to run with admin rights, it was storing the info in some of the first sectors of the HD (yes it's possible without direct hardware access, you "just" need admin rights). Of course it corrupted my GRUB... they didn't think that there might be useful data between the MBR and the first partition. This happened around 2010, so no need to go back to Windows 9x to find very weird stuff ;)

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050607-00/?p=35...

"What if two programs did this?"

You're giving me flashbacks to the bad old days when Opera was the only competent browser for Windows Mobile devices. What made them the bad old days? They only had a trial version, and some time after the paid version didn't come out the date limit on the trial version expired, so thousands of people turned the dates back and sacrificed the entire "organization" category of PDA functionality just to keep using a good browser.

I believe a full version of Opera was eventually released but it took a very long time.

Not sure what version you're talking about, but I had 6.1, 6.5 devices and they all ran fennec (firefox).

Fennec came out in 2009, five or six years after the events I'm talking about.

Age of Empires 2 does something similarly tricky for beta/trial versions - when it's check_expiration check fails once, it writes some "hard to find" registry value (Software\X\DT2 to 1 for aok and Software\TC\XPX to 7 for aoc), and then thereafter also fails if this value exists and is the previously written value to prevent you changing your system clock to circumvent that check.

Of course that's all rather silly since a 1 byte change in WinMain also defeats this, but that requires modifying the program ...

Actually many programs write license/demo expiry/... data to very hard-to-find registry keys... maybe just in plain sight under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion which has so much stuff that basically nobody knows what actually belongs there, unless you are monitoring it for changes...

Keeping “snapshots” of your registry on a windows machine is one of the fastest ways to improve your understanding of how a lot of commercial software “does business”. From weird (or outright dangerous trial license tricks, I once saw a shareware program that stashed its keys with a fake program name in a legit Adobe registry tree path) to programs that store detailed settings to a level that really warrants a dedicated settings file/database or even what UI mode they are in just spamming the registry all the time… no wonder some people had constant problems with registry corruption back in the day!

Indeed, I've seen so many weird places program wrote license/demo timer data to... not sure if it was the same software as you (can't even remember which one it was) but a shareware writing to a legit Adobe key reminds me of something... ;-)

> So I was able to use the utility to discover and defeat the trial protection of itself.

This is why I used to feel bad for Hex Rays / IDA Pro. When your product is a disassembler, there's bound to be someone in your target audience capable of cracking your software.

P.S. Don't use a cracked IDA Pro. Checkout Hopper instead. It's reasonably priced and really solid software. Been using it on and off for years.

Nope, ghidra. Better disassembler

The inbuilt vtable detection is nice, you don't have to remember to update and run Class Informer every time you want to look at a vtable...

I'd suggest checking out Binary Ninja [1] as well. Also reasonably priced and very solid, but available on all platforms --- not to mention having a much nicer UI and API than all the other tools out there.

[1] https://binary.ninja

Disclosure: I'm currently an intern working on the product.

Cracking IDA Pro used to be part of the experience.

For me it was Numega's SoftICE, which was an amazing debugger. Using it to defeat it's own protection always struck me as ironic, but I guess also to be expected.

I hacked software for many years, for my personal amusement rather than profit, as it always reminded me of being a teenager hacking games for infinite lives, etc.

Now and again I take a stab at commercial linux software, but there isn't so much out there with the standard "Enter License Key" kinda protection.

> as it always reminded me of being a teenager hacking games for infinite lives, etc

Now you have Cheat Engine[1] specializing just on that

[1] https://cheatengine.org/

My Google-fu is failing me at the moment, but I remember a piece of malware actually included the copyright string of a disassembler so it would detect "itself" and not let you analyze the malware sample.

Going to show just how rudimentary said scanning is sometimes.

Hey mike_d, I remember this as well. Using my google-fu, I found it. Google: "hopper disassembler" copyright text OR string

https://alexomara.com/blog/a-silly-anti-disassembly-trick/

backup links:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210830080742/https://alexomara...

https://archive.is/uzga3

From the article:

> One of the limitations to at-least the demo of Hopper is that it is not able to disassemble itself.

I was curious as to whether this limitation was present in the latest licensed version of Hopper (4.8.2).

I can confirm that I can indeed disassemble Hopper itself. Whether there's some intentional mistakes in that disassembly I don't really have time to delve into, unfortunately.

This bit me once when I was hosting my FPGA design on an NFS server which lost the CMOS battery so it came up with a very weird date. The computer mounting it was fine but the files would get their access time screwed up. And then FlexLM bombed out. So very annoying.

> Though I am still sad that Adobe switched to a subscription based payment

Blackmagic Davinci Resolve is pay-once-for-life, works on linux, and is better than Premiere.

Even if it were only equally good, not being subscriptionware means I'm a loyal user.

Been using DaVinci Resolve for a couple of years and love it to bits :) It’s Photoshop and Illustrator that I miss the most. Occasionally I also miss Adobe Animate.

I prefer Pixelmator to Photoshop, and it's also not a subscription (and made by cool people).

I still don't have a Lightroom replacement, so I just crack it.

I've heard fairly good things about Capture One. I haven't tried it yet though.

Capture One? Not cheap, admittedly, and you only get updates for the major version number you bought, but I guess it depends what you miss most about Lightroom?

Darktable has its fans as well, but I haven't tried recent versions.

I heard that the pricing on CC is now creeping into a point where some large media companies are now looking for alternatives and spending money retraining their staff.

Basic users don't even have to pay, and if you're doing something that requires the paid version you can buy and will benefit from the $300 control surface that also includes a Studio license.

Non-pro Resolve can't edit h265/HEVC, which is more and more common out of cameras (like my a7s3) these days.

The license isn't expensive for what you get. I bought the USB dongles so I can easily transfer it between computers and also completely block Resolve from accessing the network via Little Snitch.

I can also heartily endorse the Speed Deck control surface, which is way less than $300 and also comes with a pro license.

> Non-pro Resolve can't edit h265/HEVC, which is more and more common out of cameras (like my a7s3) these days.

When I come across files that DaVinci Resolve won’t open, I convert them to a format that DaVinci Resolve likes by first using the open source command-line utility ffmpeg.

That sounds like the steps I saw to get a free version of the original version of Little Snitch. Simply use Little Snitch to stop Little Snitch from phoning home.

Unfortunately Little Snitch stopped allowing itself to be blocked and turned into a full blown rat. That said, Lulu is free