[giamma]

This reminds me the old days of Windows 95 when I found a software to burn CDs that had a trial version which was limited to 150MB of data or so. If you tried to create a CD bigger than that it would refuse to burn and it would instead open a popup and tell you that the image exceeded the limit of XYZ blocks allowed by the trial version.

So I first decompressed the executable program (Windows executable were often packed at that time [0]), then I opened a binary editor, looked for that specific number in hexadecimal notation in the binary and changed to something much higher. I was than able to burn CDs without limitation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_compression

[notpushkin]

My grandma used to be playing casual games from a certain publisher on her PC. They were all trial versions, though, limited to 30 minutes or so. Turns out, the time left was stored in the registry, and didn’t have any validation – so when a 10 y.o. me made a quick edit, she was left with 4294967295 minutes of trial left.

[davidwritesbugs]

Hope she knows she still only has 3million trial days left

[itsTyrion]

I used to patch games for my mom that had a different mechanism but also 30 min of trial. got 5 bucks for each one and mom didn't have to pay 15-30. good times and the easiest money ever

[compsciphd]

back in the mid to late 90s, I got a trial for compuserve that was a free 2 month trial. I liked it as as they provided dialup PPP access so was able to use it as full time internet access. It wasn't quite "2 months" of access though. It was 1500 hours of access (which in practice > 24*62).

However, their usage accounting software wasn't great. I had it setup to reconnect if the connection dropped, and they didn't do a great job seeing this, so they accused me of using 2-3k hours during those 2 months (should be impossible if always coming from the same #) and sent me a large bill (for the hours used over 1500). They eventually gave in when I showed them it was impossible and they could validate that the calls were coming from the same line due to the connection dropping and being simple reconnections.

[andreaven]

you were lucky it was an unsigned var..

otherwise you could have gifted a very nasty trial time of -1 minute! a pretty nice anti-addiction feature :-)