I’ve been getting a few visitors through hiderefer.com lately. As a software developer I know what that means. Peel has most likely been cracked and is distributed through a website that routes every link through hiderefer.com or a similar site.

It’s no big news, Peel has been cracked before and I usually don’t waste my time looking into that. This time however I decided to disassemble the cracked version and see what had been changed. After collecting the data from otool I ran diff on both versions.

diff cracked original 
1c1
< /Users/hjaltij/Misc/Cracked/Peel.app/Contents/MacOS/Peel (architecture ppc):
---
> /Users/hjaltij/Misc/Original/Peel.app/Contents/MacOS/Peel (architecture ppc):
27066c27066
< 0001c754    bne    0x1c850
---
> 0001c754    beq    0x1c850
37227c37227
< /Users/hjaltij/Misc/Cracked/Peel.app/Contents/MacOS/Peel (architecture i386):
---
> /Users/hjaltij/Misc/Original/Peel.app/Contents/MacOS/Peel (architecture i386):
64993c64993
< 0001c2ec    jnel    0x0001c3e7
---
> 0001c2ec    jel    0x0001c3e7

That’s not much, only two changes and since Peel is a universal binary it’s just one line for each architecture. I’m no assembly expert but it doesn’t take much to see that a condition has been changed so it evaluates to the opposite of the original. I took a look at the method in Xcode and saw that it wasn’t actually doing anything critical. Instead the method checks if there is any license information in the user’s preferences file and reads it if so. So by inverting these conditions the cracker did not bypass the copy protection but instead made it so that if the user decides to buy a license he will have to enter it every time the application starts.

I’ve always thought that you shouldn’t spend too much time on copy protection because it will eventually be broken but it might be worth the while to see what the cracker did even if it’s only for a good laugh.

I switched to Mac about two years ago, mainly because I didn’t see any progress in the Windows world. It used to be exciting to be a Windows user and I remember waiting for the next release of Windows just like a little boy waiting for christmas. I often installed beta versions of Windows only to try out all the new exciting features.

Eventually it all faded away, Vista had been in the makings for about seven years and there was just nothing to get excited about anymore. I slowly realized that if I wanted new features and a better experience I had to make a change. However, I postponed it in 2003 when I needed a new laptop. I was beginning my first semester in computer science and somehow thought that I wouldn’t be able to do all my assignments on a Mac.

I finally switched in 2006 and it only took me a few days to realize that I was wrong. I didn’t need Windows at all.

Back on topic. When I was a Windows user I didn’t buy software. That’s right, I have never bought software for Windows. I didn’t even think about it before I switched. I’m not going to try to excuse myself. I know it’s wrong, illegal and all that but that’s not really the subject of this article. (We had a fairly good academy deal at my university so I got all the tools I needed for my projects.)

However, I had already bought a Mac application before I switched. (Money very well spent on TextMate). With that said, since I jumped over, I’ve bought every software I need and I’m going to list the reasons that I think made me start buying software.

• Mac software is in general better designed, more fun to use, more straight to the point and not bloated with features you don’t need.

• It’s almost always very fairly priced. You can get quality software for as little as 15$. That’s nothing, even if I only use it once it has already saved me money.

• Mac developers are often in a small team so they can give a personal service and really listen to their users. This also means that they can make changes and fill requests more quickly and easily. This is described in details in Getting Real by 37signals.

I believe that if Windows software was better designed, less bloated and fairly priced I wouldn’t have to admit that I didn’t pay for all the software I used when I was a Windows user.