Random Rants & Raves

My fellow RD Chris Auld pointed us to an interesting read on a detailed analysis of the infamous Excel 2007 bug (PDF)  that I mentioned earlier. The article talks about the author's attempts in uncovering what goes on behind the scenes in creating this unique problem.

When you read the article, you will realize that the author without access to the source code of Excel 2007 actually went through the assembly code of the program to figure out what was going on. Reading this took me back a few years when I was researching an article for PCQuest on software cracking. At that time shareware programs were fast coming out and cracks were appearing quickly too. To figure out how these were being done, I went deep into the underground of the Internet and hung out at all the cracking locations and went through books, tutorials, examples etc. to understand how the cracking groups could crack software and make registration keys, patches. et. al.

The end result of this research was an article I title "The Dark Art of Cracking". It was published in the May '99 issue of PCQuest and became one of the biggest hit articles in the magazine for a long time. For many years I kept receiving emails from people who wanted to know more about this. In the article, I ensured that I never gave out details on how to actually perform a crack - but made sure I mentioned all the different ways that a software could be cracked that was prevalent at that time. To all the people who wanted detailed instructions I politely turned them away and told them to go buy the software they wanted.

I had some crowning achievements with this article - at one point in time it was syndicated through CIOL - the online marketing branch of the company that owns PCQuest to about 30 other sites. The entire article was published in one of the cracking tutorial "e-booklets" that was released by The Phrozen Crew - ironically, it was from these very booklets that I myself had learnt cracking. I was myself able to successfully figure out the registration routines of about 7-8 applications by stepping through their assembly code.

Sadly, this article is no longer archived on PCQuest's site. However, I was able to find a Windows Live Search cache of a site who had quoted my entire article as the owner's first "lesson" in cracking. You can find this online here. If you are interested, you can also download a PDF of the article from here.