[ofalkaed]

This gives me some serious nostalgia for those simple and naive days. Around 95' is when I accomplished my one and only successful attempt at cracking. Some company had their software downloads in password protected StuffIt archives, anyone could download the software but you had to buy it to get the password so you could decompress the archive. I really wanted to use that software and I searched everywhere on the net and on BBSs for that program or the password with no luck, so I set out to crack the archive. I made two archives, one with password protection and one without and then opened them in ResEdit, turns out the only difference between them was that the protected file had a second resource other than the data, delete that extra resource and it became a normal unprotected StuffIt archive.

I shared my findings to the community and within days it was all over the web and on every BBS, people where pretending they were the ones who made the hack, it was everywhere. Within weeks StufIt released a free update to fix this and I felt quite powerful at the effect I had caused. Years later I realized that my crack was banal and probably common knowledge to anyone but an ignorant teenager, most were just smart enough to not share it and ruin a good thing. So I inadvertently made the digital world a safer place.

Edit: thinking on it more, I doubt I was even the first person to share this information, I was just the first person stupid enough to share it on an easy to find warez/cracking site that everyone had access too. I also seem to recall that Stuffit explicitly said that this password protection was not a safe or reliable way to protect your data, if you wanted that you had to upgrade to the paid version. I probably had no real effect on anything and the new password protection StuffIt rolled out was probably already in the works when I showed up.