Software cracking is an act of removing copy protection from a software. Copy protection can be removed by applying a specific crack. A crack can mean any tool that enables breaking software protection, a stolen product key, or guessed password. Cracking software generally involves circumventing licensing and usage restrictions on commercial software by illegal methods. These methods can include modifying code directly through disassembling and bit editing, sharing stolen product keys, or developing software to generate activation keys. Examples of cracks are: applying a patch or by creating reverse-engineered serial number generators known as keygens, thus bypassing software registration and payments or converting a trial/demo version of the software into fully-functioning software without paying for it. Software cracking contributes to the rise of online piracy where pirated software is distributed to end-users through filesharing sites like BitTorrent, One click hosting (OCH), or via Usenet downloads, or by downloading bundles of the original software with cracks or keygens.
Warez is a common computing and broader cultural term referring to pirated software that is distributed via the Internet. Warez is used most commonly as a noun, a plural form of ware, and is intended to be pronounced like the word wares. The circumvention of copy protection (cracking) is an essential step in generating warez, and based on this common mechanism, the software-focused definition has been extended to include other copyright-protected materials, including movies and games. The global array of warez groups has been referred to as "The Scene", deriving from its earlier description as "the warez scene". Distribution and trade of copyrighted works without payment of fees or royalties generally violates national and international copyright laws and agreements. The term warez covers supported as well as unsupported (abandonware) items, and legal prohibitions governing creation and distribution of warez cover both profit-driven and "enthusiast" generators and distributors of such items.
A disk image is a snapshot of a storage device's structure and data typically stored in one or more computer files on another storage device. Traditionally, disk images were bit-by-bit copies of every sector on a hard disk often created for digital forensic purposes, but it is now common to only copy allocated data to reduce storage space. Compression and deduplication are commonly used to reduce the size of the image file set. Disk imaging is done for a variety of purposes including digital forensics, cloud computing, system administration, as part of a backup strategy, and legacy emulation as part of a digital preservation strategy. Disk images can be made in a variety of formats depending on the purpose. Virtual disk images are intended to be used for cloud computing, ISO images are intended to emulate optical media and raw disk images are used for forensic purposes. Proprietary formats are typically used by disk imaging software. Despite the benefits of disk imaging the storage costs can be high, management can be difficult and they can be time consuming to create.
Copy protection, also known as content protection, copy prevention and copy restriction, describes measures to enforce copyright by preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media.
A live CD is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading from a hard disk drive. A live CD allows users to run an operating system for any purpose without installing it or making any changes to the computer's configuration. Live CDs can run on a computer without secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive, or with a corrupted hard disk drive or file system, allowing data recovery.
An optical disc image is a disk image that contains everything that would be written to an optical disc, disk sector by disc sector, including the optical disc file system. ISO images are expected to contain the binary image of an optical media file system, including the data in its files in binary format, copied exactly as they were stored on the disc. The data inside the ISO image will be structured according to the file system that was used on the optical disc from which it was created.
A ROM image, or ROM file, is a computer file which contains a copy of the data from a read-only memory chip, often from a video game cartridge, or used to contain a computer's firmware, or from an arcade game's main board. The term is frequently used in the context of emulation, whereby older games or firmware are copied to ROM files on modern computers and can, using a piece of software known as an emulator, be run on a different device than which they were designed for. ROM burners are used to copy ROM images to hardware, such as ROM cartridges, or ROM chips, for debugging and QA testing.
Alcohol 120% is a disk image emulator created by Alcohol Soft. It can create and mount disc images in the proprietary Media Descriptor File format. Images in this format consist of a pair of .mds and .mdf files. Alcohol 120% can also convert image files to the ISO format. Alcohol Soft has cited it will not be developing an image editor for Alcohol 120%.
DVD Shrink is a freeware DVD transcoder program for Microsoft Windows that uses a DVD ripper to back up DVD video. The final versions are 3.2.0.15 (English) and 3.2.0.16 (German); all other versions, such as DVD Shrink 2010, are illegitimate. DVD Shrink's purpose is, as its name implies, to reduce the amount of data stored on a DVD with minimal loss of quality, although some loss of quality is inevitable. It creates a copy of a DVD, during which the coding only allowing the DVD to be played in certain geographical areas is removed, and copy protection may also be circumvented. A stamped DVD may require more space than is available on a writeable DVD, unless shrunk. Many commercially released video DVDs are dual layer ; DVD Shrink can make a shrunk copy which will fit on a single-layer writeable DVD, processing the video with some loss of quality and allowing the user to discard unwanted content such as foreign-language soundtracks.
SafeDisc is a copy protection program for Microsoft Windows applications and games distributed on optical disc. Created by Macrovision Corporation, it was aimed to hinder unauthorized disc duplication. The program was first introduced in 1998 and was discontinued on March 31, 2009.
StarForce Technologies is a Russian software developer with headquarters in Moscow. Its main activities are information security, protection against unauthorized copying, modification, and analysis (decompilation).
CD/DVD copy protection is a blanket term for various methods of copy protection for CDs and DVDs. Such methods include DRM, CD-checks, Dummy Files, illegal tables of contents, over-sizing or over-burning the CD, physical errors and bad sectors. Many protection schemes rely on breaking compliance with CD and DVD standards, leading to playback problems on some devices.
CloneDVD is a proprietary DVD cloning software, developed by Elaborate Bytes, that can be used to make backup copies of any DVD movie not copy-protected. The program is able to transcode a dual layer DVD movie to fit it onto a DVD-R, DVD+R or DVD+R DL disc. Users also have the choice to strip audio streams, subtitles and chapters. This is called customize. For example, users can edit and delete certain parts of a DVD that they don't want burned, such as the main menu, bonus features, commentary, or certain scenes from the actual DVD. By moving a quality bar the user can make the DVD fit its target medium.
IMG, in computing, refers to binary files with the .img filename extension that store raw disk images of floppy disks, hard drives, and optical discs or a bitmap image – .img.
RedFox is a software development company based in Belize. The company is most prominently known for its software AnyDVD, which can be used to bypass copy protection measures on optical media, including DVD and Blu-ray Disc media, as well as CloneCD, which is used to back up the contents of optical discs.
Virtual disk and virtual drive are software components that emulate an actual disk storage device.
The Content Scramble System (CSS) is a digital rights management (DRM) and encryption system employed on many commercially produced DVD-Video discs. CSS utilizes a proprietary 40-bit stream cipher algorithm. The system was introduced around 1996 and was first compromised in 1999.
A CD-ROM is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both computer data and audio with the latter capable of being played on a CD player, while data is only usable on a computer.
Notable software applications that can access or manipulate disk image files are as follows, comparing their disk image handling features.
