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Making Closed Software Act Like It's Open

Posted by kdawson on from the latter-day-screen-scrape dept.

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."

2 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Screen Scraper by BarryJacobsen · · Score: 5, Informative

    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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  2. Re:The real question is- by tokul · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.