This is satire, right?<p>"A plaintext file requires a special tool, called a text editor, to change its content."<p>"I recommend notepad.exe or pico. Linux hackers may use WINE to run notepad.exe." [rofl]<p>EDIT: I think it's just the author's sense of humor, not actually satire.
That's an interesting anti-pirating technique... Demonstrate how to crack your own licensing, while at the same time adding a backdoor to make users conflate the two. Obviously, all cracked versions of his software have backdoors in them...<p>Except his attack is valid against all unsigned binaries... even his own. He could be distributing a backdoor and not even be aware of it...
That's brilliant. Make it as easy as possible for "cracked" versions of your product to contain malicious back doors, thus encouraging people to avoid the cracked copies and pay for a properly licensed one.
This is really funny - but the content shows the author's dedication to teaching (and learning) penetration techniques, even when it involves his own software. I would imagine that losing potential customers isn't a concern because the kind of people buying this software (generally) wouldn't run pirated versions. So instead, it makes a cool demo. Very cool, raffi.
I've actually wondered if the cracked versions of Photoshop tend to have backdoors... and with the recent articles on the NSA, if the NSA itself is trying to put out the most popular cracked versions. I mean, if there's a single piece of software that is more pirated, I don't know what it is. They probably have more sophisticated ways, but you never know.
That's why I am of a firm belief that if you are going to pirate software, at least have the common decency to crack it your self and NOT REDISTRIBUTE.<p>On a side note I am amazed that more developers do not sign their own code with checksums and alteration verification routines. Sign your software, then do a runtime check if the code has been altered. If so, after few hours of use, present the user with a nice message:<p>"Congratulations, you have a cracked copy of our software. We find it sad that you did not want to buy it from us. It's possible that we may starve as a result. In any case, we would like you to stop using this copy. To encourage you to do so we are going to begin now uploading the contents of your hard drive to our servers. You may stop this process at any time by closing the program and removing it from your computer. Thank you."
This would seem like the perfect tactic if the software also has a quiet phone-home system built in that contacts the author if the file checksums don't match. I bet you could get interesting statistics on how many people would try this method after publishing such an article.
What if the software requires an internet connection to dial back home & verify the software authenticity .. say once every 30 days? Is that too annoying for users?
Why is he root on his own machine when he uses unzip?<p>I hope this is satire. "The unzip tool uses a sophisticated algorithm based on LZ77 and Huffman coding". Oh wow. Who would have thought. " These files do not represent the socio-economic status of the code." Oh.<p>Lame humor.