
Interview with a cracker - pw
http://successfulsoftware.net/2011/04/07/interview-with-a-cracker/
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randrews
If you enjoy puzzle games and programming I would strongly urge you to look
into learning to crack. I'm not very good at it (it usually takes me a couple
days to break into lightly-protected Mac software) but it's way more fun and
challenging than any other puzzle I know.

Just don't release what you crack. I either delete the cracked one or pay for
it after I'm done; cracking things is more fun than using them to me.

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mahmoudimus
I've previously had interactions with CrackZ. He's an incredibly sharp
individual.

He runs a reverse engineering forum called woodmann and he has some great
essays here: <http://www.woodmann.com/crackz/index.html>

Definitely worth reading if you're into reverse engineering.

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iuguy
If you want to learn more about cracking, the woodmann pages are probably
amongst the best (the guy being interviewed is involved in woodman)[1].

If you want to learn more about reversing in general (which in many respects
is a lot more wholesome and for some, interesting than cracking) try BIW[2] as
the woodmann library is easy to get lost in.

[1] - <http://www.woodmann.com/forum/index.php>

[2] - <http://www.reversing.be/>

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SageRaven
I'm all for cracking. In this age of multi-TB drives, it severely pisses me
off when I can't rip a DVD/CD to disk or must have the CD/DVD in the drive to
play a game. As an admin, mention of "flexlm" gets my blood boiling.

As illustrated by the zillions of man-hours wasted on the cat-and-mouse game
of protection/cracking, as opposed to productive furthering of the software or
other coding pursuits, protection is a waste of everyone's time, especially of
the end-user who must put up with it.

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DTrejo
_A few software authors have ‘crack catcher pages’ for the search engines that
say things like “I work 60hrs per day on my software, please support me if you
want me to continue adding features” etc._

Sounds like it would also be a good idea to include some comments / code in
there for crackers to stumble across and guilt them into stopping.

~~~
Locke1689
Uhh... when was the last time you shipped software with source code or
unstripped binaries? Might as well put up a white flag at that point.

~~~
hermitcrab
A cracker will be able to see any unencrypted strings in your binaries.

e.g.

const char* s = "Dear Cracker...";

~~~
Locke1689
Yup, I guess you can put any unencrypted line in the .text that you want. I
would probably encrypt all the strings though (and just insert the unencrypted
in manually).

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Emore
Why does a cracker use a Hotmail account?

~~~
pak
Because you wouldn't expect one to?

~~~
Emore
I guess. Somehow I pictured crackers jumping between disposable mailing
accounts. Or better yet, substituting email needs for /msg on obscure IRC
networks.

~~~
conductor
He is not a scene cracker, real sceners would never speak public, the sceners
are very paranoic about their privacy and security (several layers of vpn
and/or bnc) (and they have reasons, there were several raids of several so
called top-sites in yurop). Also they don't spread their releases, they "pre"
them into the scene and for the scene, but of cource, there are "unsecure"
guys there who spread them to p2p/rapidshare/etc.. And site ops are hunting
them down and banning from the scene.

I can answer to questions, if you want to ask more.

~~~
soulclap
There are quite a few 'public' places where you can hear 'real sceners' speak
these days. Also NFO files (which often contain a lot of 'talk' as well) and
scene magazines (such as commented charts) have always been there.

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adamta
Ohhh, that kind of cracker. I thought it was just going to be an interview
with a white guy.

