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Software Deletes Files to Defend Against Piracy
teamhasnoi writes "Back in 2004, we discussed a program that deleted your home directory on entry of a pirated serial number. Now, a new developer is using the same method to protect his software, aptly named Display Eater. In the developers's own words, 'There exist several illegal cd-keys that you can use to unlock the demo program. If Display Eater detects that you are using these, it will erase something. I don't know if this is going to become Display Eater policy. If this level of piracy continues, development will stop.'"
Considering that in our legal systems two wrongs don't make a right (and three rights make a Nazi demo...) vigilante justice like this should be punished. That developer better hope the court he'll face accepts EULAs as valid and he never travels into a country where they aren't.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
At least here in the UK, I believe this would be a criminal offense. Of course the pirates might not want to report his crime, but he's still breaking the law.
Wow. He's certainly convinced me to give his software a try...
This guy's the limit!
"There exist several illegal cd-keys that you can use to unlock the demo program. If Display Eater detects that you are using these, it will erase something ... If this level of piracy continues, development will stop."
Uh, no. Development will stop as the police collect your computers as evidence that you are the developer and distributor of software that intentionally erases files without user permission.
That's vigilantism, pure and simple. Doesn't matter if the person was a pirate or not, you're not allowed to commit a crime to protect your "property."
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Excuse your hasty comments? This is Slashdot - we practically demand hasty comments.
When I first read the link to the author's comments, I noticed that he doesn't actually say what will be deleted. So I was thinking maybe he deletes something that disables his own program - which wouldn't be that outrageous to me; it'd be a hassle to reinstall all the time and would discourage pirated use.
It's mentioned in the older Slashdot story, though, that he's deleting home directories. That's bad.
Also, we should note in the interests of factual correctness (something Slashdot doesn't demand) that he would delete only for cases where a pirated key was used. It doesn't say anything about incorrectly entered keys, just pirated ones. That's a little better, but I still think he's going way too far.
It's not.
Reading the linked discussion thread, this 'feature' was discovered when someone tried to pirate the software so they could review it against the product they were writing.
So... no, it's not an idle threat, and the author is a freaking asshole who deserves to have his reputation destroyed over this.
I write a shareware program (BlueBox Invoices) that lots of people have registered over the course of the past 9 years it has been around.
It is a fully functional program WITHOUT registering, yet many people take the suggestion to register, and it pays for continued development.
If you're going to get your panties in a knot over some people using your software, you probably should be writing some software more innovative than a screen caputure utility. The world is already filled with those.
Attention Users! Version 2099.0999 X of my software now comes with a special new feature! File deletion! To enable this great new feature, please find a pirated software key on the web and enter it. Any files that you have in "C:\Documents and Settings" will be deleted.
FAQ for possible problems using this great new feature:
This is why I use Windows. It's far too easy for malware to get onto a Mac and start deleting user files. PCs got over the delete random files / reformat phase of malware years ago. There's far more money to be made by keeping the machine alive.
Now the page shows it rated at the lowest value possible in all categories, and the comments are full of "don't buy this software" as well. I also noticed that searching for "Display Eater" on the site no longer returns anything, which seems to indicate they removed it from the listing.
Talk about a moronic idea -- if piracy was already a problem, the result of this will be much greater than the problems piracy ever created. And ironically enough, this will make pirating the product a safer proposition. Do you want to use a legal version, which has this file deleting "feature" that might one day go wrong and nuke something? O do you get the pirated version with the file deleting code removed from it?
This is a more extreme version of what happens with other sorts of copy prevention. There are games out there that run faster and more stable with the CD check disabled.
I just wanted to say thanks for operating this way, and I hope you've received enough from registrations to make it worth your while. I don't use BlueBox, but I appreciate the thought.
I will admit that I have way too much pirated software on my system at home. Of course, I'm also not using most of it. For the most part, I prefer to demo software I've never used - it's just too hard to get through the marketing hype to determine if it really works for me. I must have thirty or forty apps for video conversion. I use three. No, scratch that - I'm down to two now. One is freeware, and the other I registered.
Sadly, 15 day - and sometimes 30 day - trials just aren't enough. Because I'm busy, I may install something to try it, and then not really get to try it out fully for a couple of months. Which means I either get a cracked copy to try it, or I pass.
While I may not have all the software I own registered, I make sure to register those that really help - even those that don't require it. Since I'm not a programmer, I do rely on these "little" apps to help out. Rename1-4a, IrfanView, and a couple of others I find indespensible. I always make sure I pay for anything I'm still using after 6 months. If I 'm still using it, it's got to be good enough to pay for. Oddly, I still have some crakced versions I use becuase I'm too lazy to enter the real SNs. I have two or three versions of Nero floating around, not all of them with legitimate SNs, but I have three consecutive version retail registry numbers I paid for, so I'm calling it even.
Anyway, thanks for being generous. Some of us out here really appreciate it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The article and submission build on a misunderstanding. I conducted some research of my own and I've found that it does not attempt to delete the full home directory. It only deletes the ~/Library/Application Support/display_eater/ directory, i.e. files created by the trial version of the program. In fact, the developer says that the program will delete something from the home directory, but doesn't say what.
While I didn't acquire one of the pirated serial numbers that trigger the behavior, I have disassembled the program and these are my conclusions: The deletion is done by a function destroy() at offset 0xd148 that takes a single argument specifying the path to delete. destroy is called from a single location in the program:
+276 0000d3e4 3863a020 addi r3,r3,0xa020 ~/Library/Application Support/display_eater/ +280 0000d3e8 4bfffd39 bl _destroydestroy() loops over each thing contained by this directory and deletes it. I've invoked the function in this way, and it does not delete anything since that directory does not exist on my system.
So, while this anti-piracy tactic sure won't convince any potential pirates to actually pay for the software, it is not as egregious as the summary suggests.
It would be nice if someone would verify these conclusions, perhaps using a real pirated key.
You can't take the sky from me...
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
To see what the fuss is about, I downloaded the 'demo' and took a look inside the executable. (No way am I running the damn thing!) There are some really amateurish icons and bitmaps, and the the string table reads like it was written by an emo kid. I'd reproduce some of them here, but fucking slashcode seems to be eating the long strings.
Really, the whole thing looks like it was written by a goofy high-school kid. Since he is displaying the Apple Universal Binary logo on his site, I suspect he's in violation of the logo licence agreement, and I suspect Kagi, his payment processor, won't be too pleased with him, either.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Oh great, it's the stupid analogies again.
But since you like them so much, I'll point that it's in fact illegal in many places to booby trap your property. So if you have any great ideas, like turrets that automatically shoot at intruders, or connecting AC to the window frame, you will find that if a thief gets hit with any of that they can sue you -- and win.
In your case, there's a crime being committed: trespassing, and breaking and entering. But that in fact gives you no right whatsoever to make a mechanism that pours boiling pitch on the intruder. Your right to shoot trespassers in most place applies only to *self defense* if you personally are present. In some places you're not allowed to kill the intruder if they're not threatening you personally, and I'm pretty sure no place allows attacking an intruder by any sort of automatic means.
In this case, there's a crime being committed: copyright infringement. But that also doesn't give the author the right to take revenge by deleting files.
Reporting the IP might be considered an invasion of privacy, but it would be a far cry from deleting data irrevocably. If I was doing something like this, I'd probably just have the program queue up a mail to the BSA stating that the user is a pirate.
Or maybe (hey, this is a crazy idea) the pirated key should just not unlock the program. Whoa! What a concept! That's so ingenious, I should go patent it.
Fact is, the program knows that the key is invalid and chooses to do something malicious rather than simply ceasing to function.
We bought a webcamming system from a company called Datetopia. If the php side of the software detected $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] wasn't the one it was registered to (eg: if you decided to buy video.mydomain.com and use that for it), then it would drop its tables in the database.
The softare was badly written (used register_globals, etc), and lots of the code was put in an eval() (potentially a security nightmare), and obfusicated (base64'd, etc). We decided to scrap it, rather than reverse engineer it, so we wrote our own.
Simple as that. That STILL isn't the same as a mugging.
You know what's a lot like theft, though? Having all data in your home folder taken away from you, permanently.
If you're looking for something tangible to liken to willfull disregard of copyright for personal use, try "sneaking in a movie theatre". THAT's the same: You're enjoying someone's hard work without giving them anything, but you aren't taking anything away from them.
If you catch people sneaking in your theatre, you can kick them out, you can hand them over to the proper authorities to be dealt with according to the law, but you cannot empty their pockets and trash their contents.
No matter how entitled you feel to your entry fee, you can't dish out vigilante justice.
You can't take the sky from me...
FUD or not, I'd still be concerned that the Destroy function could go awry, and might delete files it had no business touching. That could be as simple a bug as failing to check where it's logged to before it starts killing files.
I'd also be concerned that a mere typo (or the program misreading the input) while entering a legit serial number could trigger this.
I remember some years ago a particular DOS app would delete all files in the %TEMP% directory at exit. Trouble was, it assumed that all users were savvy enough to have moved the TEMP variable away from the default, which happened to be C:\DOS. So when the program was run, at exit it proceeded to delete the contents of the user's DOS directory. (At the time the coder reacted by saying users who didn't change their TEMP variable were too stupid to live anyway... how is that his determination to make? and if so, why didn't he take steps to protect even stupid users' data??)
Several times, I've had legit software refuse to accept its legit key, and had to go find one somewhere on the net to make it work. Not just small stuff either -- in one case, the app was Win98!!
Anyway, my point is... see how easy it is for the coder to make a mistake that could cost legit users bigtime?!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Now he claims that this was only a 'scare campaign' and the program doesn't actually delete anything. What ever might be the truth, I still wouldn't trust this person.
I wouldn't dare to install anything from this guy, since there would be no way to know what kind of tantrum he was having when he was coding and what nasty suprises might come bundled with his software. Hiring this person would also be pretty risky. If he don't get high enough salary, he will plant a bomb in your companys software.
I doubt that this guy can blame piracy for the lack of money he gets from his software. I think that if you actually write good enough application you will also get paid. And if nobody buys your program, I think you should first look into mirror and at your product. Is it good enough, how many people would actually need this kind of program?
Or are there zillions of pirated copies of Display Eater around and this guy would be a millionaire if it wasn't for those nasty pirates?
Well, after this publicity, there won't be any kind of Display Eaters around. Hopefully. And perhaps this developer should be introduced with the law, just to make sure that he won't be coding any more malware in the future. We have enough of that allready.
Even if Microsoft and RIAA can get away with 'scare campaigns', you might not.
I will remember this name, Reza and keep far away from your 'products'.