How to Crack: By Unit Seven The Temple Of Knowledge
Chapter 1 It's a Scheme Game
The first thing you should do before you crack any ware is to identify completely what scheme they are using to protect their ware. On the Mac, schemes are usually basic and easy to get around. Some of the more common ones include:
* Password Protection
* Serial Number Protection,
* Key Disk Protection
* Date Expiration Protection (for Betas usually)
* HardWare Key Protection
We'll look at these schemes one at a time and I will provide examples for each later. Right now, I want to explain how to determine what protection is what. First off, before you do anything make a backup of the application you are going to tamper with. This way if you screw up you will have something to go back to later.
Ok, now when you launch the application a couple of different protection schemes will surface immediatly. If a dialog comes up immediatly and asks you to type something in, it is almost always a Password Protection Scheme or a Serial Number Scheme. Key Disk Protection Schemes will ask you to insert a floppy so it can read important data from it and then continue with the program as normal. The Date Expiration Protection Scheme is never really noticed until it expires, then everytime you run the program it will tell you it has expired and will then quit.
Probably the most overated protection scheme going is that of hardware 'key' or 'dangle' protection. Usually the software package would ship with a hardware device that you would connect to the ADB port, Serial Port, or SCSI port. The different methods of checking the hardware will be described in detail later on in this document. No need to swamp you with technical stuff just yet.
