Making Closed Software Act Like It's Open

The Installer writes "Researchers from the University of Washington have managed to add customization and accessibility options to proprietary software without ever touching the source code. Rather than alter program code, Prefab looks for the pixels associated with the blocks of code used to paint applications to a screen, grabs hold of them, and alters them according to whatever enhancements the user has chosen to apply. Any user input is then fed back to the original software, still running behind the enhanced interface."

Comments

The real question is-

[mxh83]

Are we really that desperate to continue using closed software.

Re:The real question is-

[WrongSizeGlass]

'Closed software' is a fact of life for most users. This attempt at 'expanding' the functionality isn't very impressive, though, and won't have very many real world uses. What if you resize your monitor, do your 'customizations' all go to hell?

I always liked using the plugin architecture for applications that provide it.

Re:The real question is-

[tokul]

If I distribute a customization kit for a closed source software, when is it considered like a crack ?

What's the difference between hacker and cracker?

If your customization kit does not break closed source software licensing and you don't distribute it with software that you don't own, it is not breaking any copyright laws.

Re:The real question is-

[Hurricane78]

No we aren’t. But many (pretty dumb) people have the perception that we would, because they think that others would have that perception, because (1:) they said something alike, because they themselves think that others would have that perception, because... GOTO (1).

Or in other words: Monkey, see, monkey think, monkey parrot. ^^

What most people don’t know, is that it’s all in our head. Like fashion. Why did women think that wearing rubber boots with colorful flowers on them in the middle of the summer would be cool? Because “it was the fashion at the time“. And why was it that? Because some self-appointed “fashion expert” told them so. (Because he sold that stuff. But that’s another story.)

But I think in this case there wasn’t even really a starting point. There was some perception that “that’s how it is”, because the closed source people acted more secure, because, being business people, they were trained that way.

The thing is: Why would you let it just grow on us like a mind-virus, when you can change it just like that? After all, if it’s all in our heads, it only requires some of us to always securely act how it really is: We are gaining, winning, and rolling over them in an unstoppable wave!
Have you ever noticed how a big mass of people switched their mind sets, and started to become a raging mob, or something like that? It’s that exact thing. It only needs a seed (you) who is so secure, that they start to doubt themselves. Then the rest is only a matter of that self-amplifying mechanism above, and time (depending on how strong your reality is).

It’s a big war of psychology and social engineering, for the minds of people. And I don’t let the politicians, mass media or greedy multinational corporations win it. :)
Think like this: You’re a mind hacker. And the mind is by far the most complex computer ever. Isn’t that much cooler than doing it to such a (in comparison) ridiculously simple thing as a computer (network)?

Re:The real question is-

[psnyder]

if this software is intercepting the outputs of legally-paid-for closed source software and altering them, this could never be considered a crack.

Here's Facebook threatening a Greasemonkey script developer for pretty much the same thing (altering the output after it's in the browser).

Re:The real question is-

[cbiltcliffe]

It's not expanding the functionality. It's modifying the GUI.
Maybe adding an option checkbox that wasn't there, or rearranging some dialog somewhere.

Without the source code, and more specifically, modifying the source code, it's impossible to add features in any meaningful sense.

Sure, you could add a "show all images with red background" checkbox, or something like that, and modify the program display output appropriately, but I can't imagine any case where something like that would be called a feature.

But then, I'm not among the 95% of the population that considers "Ooooh, shiny!" to be a feature, either.....

Screen Scraper

[drrck]

This is called a screen scraper, and likes to break with updates to the underlying program, right?

Re:Screen Scraper

[natehoy]

And if you've worked with screen scrapers, you'd know that most of them are based on UI elements, and an upgrade to the underlying software almost always causes problems because the UI elements frequently change when software is upgraded.

So, yes, this is a screen scraper, which means it will survive some small alterations to the UI, but you're usually looking at upgrading/rewriting the screen specs when the underlying screens change.

Seriously?

[DarkKnightRadick]

That has to add a lot of overhead to the already running process and to what benefit? If it's reading the code "as many as 20 times per second" that is going to add tons of CPU and RAM usage to the system that just isn't needed. F/OSS ftw!

Re:Seriously?

[Chris_Stankowitz]

hat has to add a lot of overhead to the already running process and to what benefit? If it's reading the code "as many as 20 times per second" that is going to add tons of CPU and RAM usage to the system that just isn't needed. F/OSS ftw!

With i7 chips, SSD HDs, 64bit OSes that support 4+ gig of triple chan memory (any or all of those in one machine are huge improvements in desktop computing power) you'll still not push it to capacity with 20 such apps running. We are at a point where we have an abundance of CPU/memory to spare, I see nothing wrong with developing such apps (if only as stop gaps) until such time that a suitable replacement arrives. These apps very well may be the impetus for the development of those open apps once it proved that a user/market base wants it.

CS-

Re:Seriously?

[edbob]

This sounds like the same sort of attitude that software writers have had for ages. Just write bloated, inefficient code and let processing power eventually catch up to run the software. I think that this needs to be a legitimate concern or we will wind up back to the point where a new version of Windows would come out and barely be able to run on the technology available. Yes, this may not add much to a computer running a Core i7 with 6 gigs of memory, but that sort of system is pretty rare in the real world. Most people use computers that are a few years old.

Headline once again

[oldhack]

The headline seems completely disconnected from text of the summary

What's actually new here?

[time961]

Tools like this have been around for ages, although they are usually called "GUI test frameworks" or "automation assistants". Such tools provide a way of scripting interactions with an existing GUI. However, they really only focus on mimicking pre-recorded user interactions--it seems like it would be quite time-consuming and fragile to reverse-engineer an arbitrary program's dialogue boxes in a robust way that would allow control to be significantly enhanced.

Also, on Windows, at least, there are tools that enhance the operation of dialogue boxes (for example, adding history and options to the File Open dialog). Those tools work at a more abstract level than snagging pixels, which is a lot more efficient--but that means they are ineffective on applications that have already customized those dialogues.

It seems like the fundamental non-breakthrough here is that the application actually must already include the functionality that you want to express in your modified UI--otherwise, you can modify the UI all you want, but the app will only do what it's capable of. So if you want it to display a bunch of different renderings in sub-windows automatically (to use their example), it had better be capable of that display already.

wallhack, aimhack, maphax

[Khashishi]

this is nothing new

And next week...

[lxs]

We show prisoners how to paint the bars on their windows the color of the sky and pretend that they are free.

Scammers have done this years ago.

[SharpFang]

Exploits that do this are in the wild.

They hijack your client display when you access a banking page, fill in the account details and amount for you, while presenting you with interface to enter your target account, then replace the data on the confirmation page with whatever you entered while obscuring the data they entered. You sign the transaction with a token or OTP and instead of sending $15 to your aunt, $10k money gets transferred to the hijacker's account in Nigeria.