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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."
Yes, it’s called GreaseMonkey.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
'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.
A more interesting question is the legality of this. If I distribute a customization kit for a closed source software, when is it considered like a crack ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
If you RTFA or WTFV, you'd know that it's detecting the input elements using an algorithm and not hard coded to the specific application (they even demoed VNCing into an OS X machine and having it detect the UI elements there and applying the processing).
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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.
While the power of the almighty EULA and(in the case of software with embedded DRM/anti-tampering features, the DMCA) might well cloud the issue, there is an analogy worth looking at.
A while back, there was a company called "CleanFlicks" that operated a movie rental service, aimed mostly at Fundie Mormons and the like. They took DVDs, reviewed them, and produced bowdlerized versions, which they then rented out. They were sued, and lost, on the grounds that they were, indeed, producing and trafficking in unlicenced derivative works.(IRRC, they purchased as many DVDs as they rented out, so they weren't illegally duplicating, ie. 1 purchase to 1 edited rental copy, in any useful way; but they were still smacked down). They exist today with a much reduced catalog of movies that fit their standards without editing.
A similar company "ClearPlay" used a different tactic. They provided specially programmed DVD players that were able to interpret a control file(programmmatic mute/unmute, FF/play, etc.) and rented unedited commercial DVDs, along with matching control files that, when used with their players, automatically "edited" the DVD as you watched it. The MPAA threw a fit; but the company survived legal challenge(it helped that congress, tipping their hat to "the children" passed a law to explicitly clarify the scope of copyright on this point). Since, unlike "CleanFlicks", they weren't actually creating a derivative work, just a control file that modified the behavior of the DVD player during playback, they were judged to be in a different category.
Again, barring the sorts of tricks that can be pulled with even weak DRM+DMCA, this sort of "customization kit" tech would probably fall into the "ClearPlay" side of the analogy. Actually selling edited binaries, even if you purchased a legitimate copy for each edited one you sold, would almost certainly put you in the "CleanFlicks" camp, and get you smacked down; but selling a customization package that modifies the appearance of a binary only at the point of execution on the end user's computer, or even selling a bundle of "copy of commercial software + installer for customization kit" would probably pass legal muster.
The only complication, of course, is that court decisions are, in practice, driven by a mixture of the text of the law and a somewhat emotive sense of "intent" or "desirable outcome". Protecting the kiddies from corruption generally wins you warm and fuzzies. It isn't clear that modifying the appearance of dialog boxes would have the same cultural clout(unless you could, say, find a nice test case involving a bunch of blind kids who are able to use $SOFWARE_X with their screenreaders for the very first time*wipes tear* or something of that sort).
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).