futplex@pseudonym.com said:
Daark writes: How would it be possible to create files that KNOW they are a copy?
It's not, to the great dismay of the Software Publishers Association (or whatever they're called).
Not to pick nits, but I was deeply into cracking^h^h^hbacking up software in the 80's, when I got my first Apple II complete with 4K of RAM. There are several schemes of copy protection that were used, like strange sector/track interleaving, and burning the floppies with lasers to render certain sectors unreadable/writable. The program would attempt to read that area of the disk, and if it couldn't it was on the original media. Of course, this was in the days before 20MB MFM drives became the rage, when Woz was king. I guess the only way for a program to know if it was a copy would be to have itself figure out what track/sector it is on and inject and/or compare that information into the executable. But since this information is no longer easy to come by as operating systems become more protected, this wouldn't be viable. Especially if you take into account that disks go bad, and backups are needed. More importantly, it would be very easy to hunt down and replace with NOPs. More so than taking out the dreaded, "enter the phrase on line 3 on page 25 on your manual..." To summarize, its possible (under _some_ operating systems), but it is not a good solution to the problem.