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

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-

[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).