OT: How to 'hack' a binary?

Any of the programmers here able to advise me on the following, or point me to the most appropriate newsgroup please?

Could I use a program like Hex Edit, Hex Workshop, Resource Hacker or similar to edit a setup program for a beta I've been using so that its expiry limitation of 1st June was removed?

I'm a registered user of a program called MemoriesOnTV. When I bought it a few months ago, the version was 2.1.8, but I was recommended soon after by the developers (now called CodeJam, a tiny Singapore-based outfit) to switch to the improved 2.2.1 beta. Despite some quirks I was successfully using this to make a few DVDs from family photos, until last Monday. Then, on loading, I got a message that it had expired and that I should instal the latest version, 2.2. I duly did that, but it doesn't work.

CodeJam have proved singularly unhelpful. Apart from the familiar "reinstall everything again..." stuff, I've had no practical help. And they've not met my request to make the working beta I was using available to me, with its 'deadline' removed, so that I could continue to use that until they fix 2.2. Having a dialogue with them is handicapped by their policy of dealing with emails for only a few minutes each day, and the 6/7 hour time zone gap exacerbates that.

I'm no programmer, but do the experts here think I could I use a hex editor program to edit the original setup program I have for this beta, motv22b1.exe (6.9MB), so that the expiry limitation of 1st June was removed? Is that feasible, or totally impractical? If it's a possibility, what approach would I take to achieving it please?

Nope, can't find it. It was about 16 years ago, when he was at U of A.

Why is that? Use a batch file, or use "Touch" to fix file dates after you run the program.

...Jim Thompson

What on earth does this have to do with electronics ?????

And yes, everything can be cracked, but that requires skills and time.

"Terry Pinnell" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Terry,

Everything can hacked but you may not live long enough to go through it. The best thing I can think of is getting on older machine, then set the BIOS time well within the period the software was supposed to work well and install a suitable OS followed by the first version of the software. By manipulating the date and inststalling the update (if necessary) you should be able to retrieve the data.

petrus bitbyter

... that sounds like a good idea...

I would look for a "date cracker"... this software/utility will "show" the program in question the time it needs to run without resetting the computers clock...

... be careful where you download it from and still run a virus scanner on it...

Warmest regards, John

"petrus bitbyter" wrote in message news:42aac8eb$0$150$ snipped-for-privacy@reader2.nntp.hccnet.nl...

...

...

Something to watch for, late at night, the night before one of the time-bomb viruses was about to go off, and I found that for some unknown reason a group of the machines in the office hadn't been scanned for this virus. All the antivirus services were overwhelmed with the number of people trying to get the latest update for this.

I thought what I would do was just set the system date on everything back by one day, go home, get some sleep, come back in the next afternoon and deal with this then. Early the next morning my phone rang. The office was in chaos, a variety of different things were failing in bizzare ways.

It turned out that more applications than I could imagine hadn't been tested to behave gracefully if clocks had been set back. Even parts of the OS didn't like this happening.

So you might be cautious about doing this.

Strictly as a toy experiment, I've wondered about the feasibility of a system where the clock would run normally, or perhaps even extremely slowly, while being used and the clock would stop completely when it wasn't being used. So you use your spice for three hours a day and the "30 days" takes eight months to elapse, or perhaps even more. But I've never tried that.

First you should try to remove the data that's blocking a new instalation. The best way to do that is to monitor the instalation with a registry/file monitor software running, like regmon, filemon by sysinternals (free) or cleansweep and remove all the registry entries from your machine. If you really want to alter the program you need to get w32dasm and hope that the text resources are not hidden or on a separate file, if they aren't you can quickly find the part of the program that calls the "evaluation expired" window and replace the jump with a nop or a jc with jnc. My knowledge stops here. If you are really into it you can spend plenty of time on the net learning, google for: hacking tutorials, +orc, perhaps you can find the "academy"...

Best Regards

That sounds handy! But presumably no chance it still exists and is downloadable?

I had thought about temporarily setting date back, but that cure could end up worse than the problem.

I'm not much of a programmer, but I tend to doubt it. As far as I know, .exe's have a compresion scheme applied. You'd likely have better luck in the registry (assuming a Windows OS), and that isd also unlikely, as they make these things unfindable usually. I'm no expert on this.

Tom

Computers are electronic...do you know what "OT" means? :-)

Tom

Yeah, but still, there are better groups for this kind of things ;-)

Many thanks, that's a new line I'll explore.

Yep, that's the sort of thing I meant.

From my attempts so far, I think you're right. Mind you, so far I worked only with the setup exe. Maybe I'll reinstall the beta, into a different subfolder of \\Program Files while I continue trying to diagnose the new 2.2 release, although I don't really want to clutter the registry with duplicate versions. And my searches for 'relevant' code were largely blind; looking for text like 'expire', '1st Jun', 'deadline', '1/6/05', '6/1/2005', etc.

That was a good suggestion about searching the registry. At HKEY_USERS\\S-1-5-21-4065617495-2690133624-1694720459-1005\\Software\\PictureToTV\\MemoriesOnTV\\Tip I found this potentially relevant entry. Any idea of its purpose, and how to interpret it please? TimeStamp REG_SZ 1060795240

BTW, a few responses I had to my similar enquiry in other newsgroups were focused on the illegality of this intention. I don't see it. I'm no lawyer, but it seems plain daft that a paid up user shouldn't be able to continue using a beta until its replacement is fixed! Or for ever, if he chooses, come to that.