Elbox have spoken

[Tigger]

seer wrote:

I do agree that such should never be in any driver or other OS stuff... Mind, I have yet to see from both sides any proof of what the code does or doesn't do. (The "hacker" -> Driver destroys RDB and data when something goes wrong; Elbox -> driver destroys unimportant bit of RDB no data is ever lost.)

You overright the RDB on your boot drive, the computer doesnt boot, how on earth can this be thought of as doing something unimportant.
       -Tig

[Tigger]

seer wrote:
@Tiger,

You overright the RDB on your boot drive, the computer doesnt boot, how on earth can this be thought of as doing something unimportant.

Read the statement from Elbox, the code doesn't do that

I'm sorry the code mangles the first block of the RDB, they admit it does that, their response is that it only takes 5 minutes with HDTOOLBOX for that info to be read from other places in the RDB and restore it.  Thats great except the drive wont boot without said block and if that drive is the boot one for your computer your computer wont boot without that block.   So when you computer doesnt boot because of this issue, are you going to see it as a problem or a non-problem???

RDB FACTS
....
the RDSK sector content is overwritten, recovering is quite simple. No backup copies of this RDB sector are necessary. All the information to be included in the RDSK sector can be read from the hard disk with HDToolBox software, even if this sector is completely overwritten. The five minutes of work needed to restore the RDSK sector does not seem to be a heavy punishment for stealing and/or cracking software...

See, read from Harddisk and restored with 5 minutes of work.  Thats great except 90+% of the amiga people arent going to realize that gee I could fix this with HDTOOLBOX and instead are going to lose their data when they reformat or throw away their drive.  They are also likely to replace their drive because its failed on them now.  Or are digging around in their floppies right now looking for a 3.1 install disk so they can boot up with hdtoolbox so they can fix a problem they wouldnt have with their drive if it wasnt for Elbox.  I'm sorry this is a trojan of the worst sort and is being sent ON PURPOSE to elbox's customers.
    -Tig

[Tigger]

ikir wrote:
I don't understand this caos.... The code was only dangerous for cracker, not for normal user..... it was a protection from other companies.....

I agree with Elbox in this point.

Wrong, first of all what they did is illegal in several countries, including the US.   Secondly, it takes one stray pointer, one PCI misread etc, to set off a program that makes your drive unusable until (at best case) you run HDToolbox (Elboxs version) or permanently lose the data (everyone who's actually tested it).   If you downloaded a program that did this, and it became known, it would be killed from aminet, why should elbox's official drivers be held to a lower standard.
     -Tig

[Tigger]

seer wrote:

What elbox describes, wether this is true or not, is that their codes overwrites a part of the RDB called RDSK  in which hardware info is stored, the number of cylinders, numbers of drive heads etc, non vital info to boot the drive. This can be easily restored with HD-toolbox, and AFAIK is not even needed to boot from the drive, or at worse see and use the drive when booting from the WB disk.

You arent think clearly, and you are incorrect in your assumption.  Think about it, if you were correct and the first block of the RDB (There words for what they are messing with) was not needed for the drive to work correctly, then there code does nothing, and they have no reason to say it only takes 5 minutes to fix with HDToolbox if it doesnt need to be fixed, and noone on ANN would have realized that this was happening, because there computers would have booted fine, etc.   Can you fix this issue with HDToolbox??   Maybe, Chris Hodges wasnt able to, and I would not consider him a novice user by any stretch of the imagination.  I worry about all those with much less experience then Chris who are supposed to figure out how to save important date on there computer because they ran DPaint 4.5 (the Enforcer hit version) while having this elbox driver installed.  
    -Tig