About date crackers

What's a date cracker?

A date cracker is a tool that fools other applications by temporarily changing the system time. There are several reasons why one would want to to this:

• Many applications, like trial versions or beta test versions of new programs, will only run during a certain time span after the installation. The date cracker is used to pretend to them that they're always running at the same date.
• Some programs may have whatever problems running at certain times. The most infamous example here is the Y2K problem. The date cracker is used as a workaround for this problem.

Why do I need a tool for that?

Good question - why not just setting the system time back and forward manually when starting an application that has "date problems"? Again there are several possible reasons:

• If you use a program frequently, you most certainly don't want to set the time back and forth at every session.
• It would also be hard to remember which date you have to pretend to which application. This is so important because some programs will recognize it when the system time is older than the installation time of the program, in which case they won't run.
• There's a reason why it's better to restore the 'real' date as soon as possible: If the program makes use of the system time information in any way and gets the 'wrong' date back, you might run into problems.
• If the system clock is adjusted to real time periodically, e.g. via the Internet, setting the time manually doesn't help much.
• In case you're not perfect, you might just forget to reset the date ;-) ... Note that there's a very serious background to this: Some evil programs will do awful things like 'stamping' your hard disk when they see that their trial days are over. This means that they won't run anymore after that, until you format your hard disk.

The Conclusion?