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Admin
And in other news 500 lawyers from the Legalese software company found Noah and Noah was found crying in the corner.
Admin
At least his error messages are thorough.
Admin
My bank does the same thing for its website login passwords.
Admin
Great 1st post!
captcha = Tasty... lol HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAH
Admin
That Microsoft leetspeak page is awesome.
Admin
it's a trap, this connects to a db once u enter that key in, and logs you, and the fact that u cracked this software so that they can sue u!
Admin
That's odd that you decided to write a "you" amidst all of the "u"
Admin
Admin
I say I only use Unix. Gets me off at work too when no IT people are around. "Sorry, I can't fix your Outlook problem."
Admin
at least he didn't write 'its'
Admin
I love specific people's names in error messages....
As a rent-a-developer (aka consultant) in the early 00's I had a company insist I put a specific person's name and extension on various error messages, a la "call Brian at ###". My suggestions of using a generic "call helpdesk" message, and generic phone extension were rejected. "We want it to be more personal" they said.... Three months after deployment, the "Brian" of that company quit. The project done, there was no money in the budget for changing messages or redeploying a new version.
-Me
Admin
Our company did that even worse. The MIS used individuals instead of roles. When someone left, the new person has to keep logging in to the old person's account, so Pam logs in as Joyce. Funniest part was when someone decided that since Joyce was gone, they could remove her account. All of the scripts, etc. attached to her account were deleted. Have they learned? Ha.
Admin
"3773 kr@xx0rs"? Come on, even the MS page does better than that. I believe the correct term is "1337 haxx0r"...
Admin
They should have used the same advanced security that all movie computer systems seem to use and only shown the digits that they got correct. That would have been much more secure!
Admin
It's "1337 h4x0r"
Admin
Ahh, imagine the possibilities.
1 - Insert card 2 - Enter random pin 3 - 5928 was incorrect, expected 2579 4 - Enter 2579 5 - PROFIT!
Or
1 - Girlfriend asks "Does this make me look fat?" 2 - "No honey, you look fine." 3 - "No honey, you look fine" was incorrect, expected "No, here's some diamonds." 4 - Er... crap that didn't turn out so good. Nevermind.
PS... what's ette supposed to be?
Admin
Admin
Why did he stop at 2010? Why not go all the way to 3000 or something? I mean who knows, they might still need it 100 years from now..
Admin
Er, 1000, even.
Admin
I think he's just trying to be funny/dumb.
Admin
Worries about the Year 2038 problem, perhaps?
Admin
The real WTF is that he's trying to tell me the internet isn't a big room-sized mainframe with blinking lights and green bar paper. Lies, all lies!
Admin
I can beat this.
There is a popular application that advertises itself as cross-platform: available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's on all 3 platforms for free in try-for-X-days-before-you-buy form; once the X days runs out, it stops working and you have to pony up for a license.
EXCEPT on the Linux version, that is, where the "copy protection" is (drum roll)... a single file created in a dot directory within your home (i.e. "~/.app-name"). Delete the dot directory, and your trial starts all over again.
(Name of application omitted to protect the not-so-innocent)
Admin
I once saw a picture of it on the...uh, Internet
Admin
PWND!!!!!111
Admin
that's ok, too. in 2000, i was a rent-a-geek and paid a huge chunk of cash for one month's work, creating a test plan and putting processes into place for handling the QA department.
three weeks after i left, someone from the company called and asked if i had kept a copy of all the documentation. as i had been informed before i joined (by signing the NDA) and before i left (by security) that doing so would be a prosecuting offense, i assured them i'd done no such thing.
turns out, the moment i left the building, security flattened the machines i worked with, including the backup on the server, so that they (security) were sure the machines could be used by joe average the next day without worrying about pesky viruses and trojans and the like...
oops.
Admin
BRILLIANT! If there's any justice in the world (there isn't) they made the security department pay for the task of recreating the data they lost.
Captcha: Cognac -- which you'd need a lot of after an episode like that.
Admin
Diamonds. She'll pretty much have to.
Admin
Ummm...shouldn't it be "Key in Lock Security"? Or am I missing something?
Admin
INVALID COMMENT KEY
Was: 329d37cb9afe00bb079d9afe00bb0b07 Expected: File not found
Admin
At the place I work we have 2 or 3 different models of machines from different companies. We order all of the machines with CDRW/DVD drives since it's always a cheap upgrade and you never have to worry about a DVD not loading. The annoying thing is that these companies always give us different DVD player software such as WinDVD or Pinnacle or what have you and, of course, the software is locked down to only work with the OEM manufacturer.
Since I like to get these machines up as soon as I can I don't have time to muck around and figure out which software goes with which make of machine I decided to try and get around this problem. I went poking around and discovered that one of the software titles comes with an INI file that specifies which manufacturers the software will install on. "No way" I thought. I added another manufacturer's name to the INI file and voila! Problem solved.
Admin
This reminds me of the way I "cracked" a few programs on Windows 3.1.
Hex Workshop: Change the "days to expire" setting in win.ini. Ultraedit: IIRC this was the same, or there was a separate INI file. Either way, same idea.
I figure it won't hurt anything to post this info because it only works on Windows 3.1 anyway. :-p The 32-bit versions use the much more secure cough method of a single registration key that can be found with a hex editor (go irony) in the executable.
Admin
Pfft a real hacker deassembles the program alters the offending conditional to always be false and reassembles the program again.
Admin
Captcha: Quake. Hmm, I wonder....
Admin
I 'cracked' a couple of games back in the day. One of them had one of those "match this picture with this phrase on the black on red sheet" things. But they gave you three tries, and they didn't use enough combinations, so one day when I was home sick from school I made a big ass matrix and solved it suduku style.
The other one was another "line X from the manual" thing. It had a data file it used with all the lines in it, all in binary and messed up - and I'm no real hax0r so I didn't have a clue how to really crack it. So I figured, what the hell, and deleted everything after a certain bit in the data file. The game reacted by skipping the questions entirely - must have been some dev shortcut or something; I can't imagine it just randomly worked.
Admin
now let me "power-up" your argument here:
Pfft a real hacker deassembles the program binary and alters the (un)conditional jump statement such as "jmp" or "jnz" with "nop" (90) to get around the protection.
The WTF of that Legalese Pro program is it come with its own keygen. It's not even a bug, it's a feature.
Admin
Makes sense... most programmers try and keep their programs running if possible even in an error condition. In this case, the question/answer data was not technically needed for the program itself to operate, so when it couldn't be loaded, the program skipped it.
Of course if it was a badly written program it would either crash or write garbage questions...
I've cracked one program that hit a unix timestamp (of when it was to expire, I guess) in among microsoft keys using a legitimate sounding value name (that changed with each version)... of course if you have a tool that sniffs registry reads and writes it stands out like a sore thumb. Then I just deleted it to reset my trial any time I wanted to.
Admin
Admin
Years ago (about 1983) I worked for a company that had a perpetual license to use a particular software package that ran on PDP-11s with RSTS/E.
In spite of the perpetual license, every three months, the software would report that the license had expired and needed to be renewed. We'ed have to call the company who would then dial into the computer and patch the program. Then it would be good for another three months.
This got old real fast.
So one time when it had expired, I copied the program to another directory before calling them so that they could patch the program.
After they had patched it, I did a binary comparison of the files. There was only one word (16 bit) difference between them.
The word in the saved version contained the last date it worked before expiring in DEC's strange julian date format (year-1970*1000 + day of year). In the new version was a date in the same format for three months later.
The answer was obvious. I changed that word to reflect a date years in the future (January 1, 2033 or 2034, I think). We never had a problem with that program expiring again.
Admin
Oh, I ran across one just about as good. We're doing some work for a company that uses a niche product in a niche market, hardware testing software. The particular package in question has to run on all the various technicians' machines. Due to the way they work, having all technicians able to use all computers and just pick their name from the list as they work on something at one particular moment is preferred, as having one tech per machine would make the workflow... difficult. In order to add more technicians to the software you have to enter the tech's name and particulars, and then take down the 22 character challenge code, call the company (located in Asia and we're on the west coast of North America, so syncing office hours is fun), read them the code, and get another code to type in. Oh, and don't even think about turning the software off between getting that code and receiving the other code, as it changes. Fun fun fun. So, this was getting to be painful and arduous setting up these machines, until I was bored one day and poked into the registry and found that the software set up keys that looked like: {HKLM/Software?<some company>/<some package>/Users User1,Bob Jones,1 User2,Bob Smith,1 User3,Bob Green,1
I thought "Can't be that easy". So I added:
User4,Bob Dobbs,1
And when I fired up the package, Bob Dobbs was there as a valid user.
<SMACK FOREHEAD>.
Now setting up a new machine is easy. The customer installs the software, clicks a .reg file and everything's happy.
And not to worry, the Asian company is informed of what the client was doing regarding having techs share machines and was fine with it as long as they bought one license per tech. This just takes the pain in the ass out of it all.
Admin
There was a trial version of a popular Paint program a couple of years ago that had Remove/Modify/Repair under the install options. It had the usual trick that if you did a full uninstall after it expired, you couldn't run it again.
However, if you chose modify, removed the core component, and then put it back, the 30 day trial would reset.
Admin
Your keyboard is broken, it seems that the y and o key don't work sometimes.
CAPTCHA: dubya -- on his keyboard the w didn't work.
Admin
Yet.
Admin
FAST are investigating this issue...
Admin
I will share with you a great and wonderful secret...
She: Does this make me look fat? You: Not really. A bit skinny if anything. Like that Kate Moss woman.
Admin
Admin
It's kind of like a picket fence. It marks your property but doesn't prevent anyone from crossing the line if they actually need to. It's not that barbed wire isn't cheap, it's rather that nobody wants to live in an impenetrable fortress. I feel much the same way about the software I use.
Whether or not it was intentional, printing the expected licence key saved the day for a legit user. There's a lesson to be learned.
Admin
A few years ago the company i worked for purchased 5 licenses of some program. It came in a protected floppy disk that could not be copied (later i read somewhere it was a format irregularity), plus every time we installed the software the fact was recorded on disk by subtracting 1 license (in a binary encrypted form). if we uninstalled the program, the disk would be updated with an extra license. The WTF is floppy's were prone to bad sectors and computers were prone to viruses, so we ended up with a failing floppy disk and only one installed licence. The solution: dd At the time I was starting to experiment with linux (mostly slackware) on an old 486 with 200Mb Disk and 8Mb Memory, had created lots of install disks with rawrite2 and dd so I gave it a shot, created an image of the floppy on disk and copied it to another floppy. Shure thing it worked! (I had tried several other DOS copy programs without result) Later I uninstalled the program to the good disk (got 2 licences on the disk) installed the last license on the original floppy to one computer and made a second copy of the two license disk, managing to recover the original 5 licenses. How's that for a n00b L|N/X 1337 h4x0r
Admin
You could often use a similar trick on trials for old (pre OS X) Macintosh programs as well. Remove the programs preference file from the system folder, and you'd get 30 more days to run. Of course you had to configure the program again, but often that was no big deal. Not that I ever used this trick... :-)
Admin
Classic WTFs FTL. Was funny before. Not so much now.