29 Jun
2006
29 Jun
'06
9:02 p.m.
David Griffith wrote:
Even more amusing are some of the lengths counterfeiters went
to in order to "appease" the anti-counterfeiting algorithms
embedded in the runtimes! The important lesson here is
never leave a go-nogo decision point in code that you
intend to protect (too easy to find those and workaround them)
On Thu, 29 Jun 2006, Don Y wrote:
[intentionally bogus streetnames]
I was told a story about how the Thomas Guide people
did this, naming an
unremarkable alley in the LA area the "Mark and Brian Expressway" after a
rather colorful pair of morning disk jockeys. Later when the city decided
to redo street signs, they used the Thomas Guide and thus ordered and
installed signs marking this particular alley.
Ha! Leave it to the gummit to take the lazy way out! :-/
In the
80's, video (arcade) game software was *regularly*
copied. Blatantly. The offenders would simply grep the binary
for key strings (like the title screen) and change them
to different text. The time required to catch the infraction,
get an injunction (usually the offending games were imports)
and have it enforced was longer than the life-cycle of the
game (at the time, many games were "90 day wonders").
Many of these ripoffs were horridly bad, though interesting examples of
beating on the thing until it works. For example, Donkey Kong running on
Galaxian hardware. Nasty colors. Nasty sounds, but it plays more or less
correctly.