On 5/15/23 07:03, Greg Wooledge wrote:
On Mon, May 15, 2023 at 12:10:13AM -0500, David Wright wrote:
I read somewhere that the recent tweaks (improvements?) to
ifconfig's output were breaking scripts, which is hardly surprising.
I can personally confirm this as true. Some of the machines at work
run a proprietary software product that uses a license key, tied to
the machine's ethernet interface's MAC address. The vendor's script
runs ifconfig and tries to parse the output to get the MAC address.
This script fails on the recent versions of net-tools.
.
One might be able to fix that with hexedit or a clone, by changing the
string causing the error back to the original version? Fix the files crc
of course. Better yet, dl the src, find that string and change it back
to the original, recompile and re-install. I note that today. neither
tool calls the MAC address MAC, and that ip and ifconfig label it with
different names. That s/b a std but insert the xckb reference to std's,
old even wrong ones never die...
This method of software protection, from my experience as broadcast
engineer, can be costly when it fails, and fixing what you paid good
money for in the faith that it would work forever but fails regularly
for whatever reason. And our copyright laws do not contain that I know
of, a provision to allow the possession of a canceled check to be
substituted for whatever scheme the vendor comes up with to enforce his
copyright. Disney got exactly what he asked for.
We at one time in the early 90's bought an editing system that had the
key buried in the serial port adapter that was used to control the tape
machines. With a limited life. The outfit was able to supply a new
adaptor, once, but had to drive the height of FL to get it from the
author of the scheme. And it was his only copy. Lasted about a month
and once again we had $25,000 worth of disabled software.
In a tv stations production dept, that's a major income hit. At that
time I knew a uni prof in germany who was pretty good at fixing buggy
amiga software, so w/o naming names I told the vendor it was not going
to be tuff excrement to us but to them, but that I would remove their
broken key and continue to use the software we had paid good money for 6
months earlier. Lots of sputtering, I hung up in the middle of it and
emailed the sw to the prof, had it back with a try this about 6 hours
later but he missed a third check, so had to go back and search thru it
again, finding the last check and nulling it out. We used the hacked
version for about a year, till we upgraded the editing machines and
never heard from that vendor again. I heard later thru the grapevine
that the vendor filed shortly after that. The hacked copy never left
the premises so as far as I was concerned the copyright was honored.
The point is that what can be done in software, can also be undone.
Cheers, Gene Heskett.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
- Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/>
