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Comment by RunasSudo | Hacker News Reader

It's a good question – I'll copy what I wrote for the Redditors who had the same thought:

> Copyright law is pretty scary around anti-circumvention rules – putting the name of the software right in an article about how to break its DRM/licensing just sounds like asking for trouble, so I never do. (Not legal advice – just my personal musings!)

> At least if the software is unnamed, the article is clearly more for educational purposes – you won't find the article if you've got the software and you're trying to break it, and you won't have access to the software if you're just reading the article.

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To be honest, it wasn't too hard to figure out what the target software was from all the subtle clues; after all, crackers are the sort of people who will enjoy such a challenge too! I won't reveal it here either for your sake, but don't think that the "anonymisation" was even close to being complete...

Then again, I also exercised my skills from the Fravia/Searchlores era ;-)

Makes a lot of sense.

Out of benign curiousity, was the software...?

- Industrial/control oriented (talking to bespoke hardware)

- An "internal" B2B line of business thing

- An off-the-shelf/productized/marketed piece of software

I suspect the latter.

I'm naturally also curious what it was for, but I suspect that even generally scoping that would make identification significantly easier for a large majority of people, so I'll leave it there :)

I mean, if the company that wrote the software doesn't exist anymore, who's going to bring that copyright claim?

Some other company or individual could have bought their IP portfolio and now own the rights. They have no obligation to publicize this, as far as I know.

On a technical point, even if the company has ceased to exist, its assets might have been sold, or it might have assigned its copyrights at some point, or perhaps a third party has a copyright interest, and there would be no way for me to know about that.

The broader point to make is that this is a general policy of mine – I deidentify all software that I discuss in any of my RE writeups. Having a blanket policy avoids needing to make ultimately arbitrary decisions about what to name and what not to name – and in any case, not naming the software doesn't prevent anyone from reading the writeup and taking inspiration from it if they choose.

I get what you are saying. These days--the first thing lawyers pay others to do is comprehense internet searches.

I've always felt the biggest mistake people make is thinking no one is looking at their ramblings.

Many companies don't just cease to exist, but rather the rights to their IP are purchased. Some of that IP is viewed as not valuable and ignored... but they still hold the rights to it.

It's a bit like landmines left over after a war.

In some cases IP like this can be even more dangerous because there is some disgruntled CEO potentially sitting around with ownership of all the IP and he/she sees you're infringement as a quick cash grab.

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