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- PREFACE -
Most Palm OS developers are hard-working
individuals, the ones that are using the tactics described below are
usually not aware that what they are doing is wrong.
Be sure to notify "non-complying" developers about this page.
UM is not and never has been an "anti-virus" (it has so much
more than just making sure applications are completely uninstalled) and there are
no Palm OS viruses that require any immediate attention; only some
developers that don't respect your rights. Please support honest
developers by purchasing the software you're using from the human beings
behind it.
The following article was
written a few years back by Jerry D. Hedden, author of
MegaWiki.
Consumer Alert Regarding Free
Trial Software
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You are most likely the victim of an insidious theft - one that you are
not even aware of it. The sellers of certain software products make use
of a deceptive marketing strategy so as to entice you to try their software.
If you did succumb to their devious ploy, then you have had a portion of
your handheld rendered (almost) permanently inaccessible to you.
They have stolen a portion of your handheld's memory for the purpose of
ensuring their own profits.
Recently, I realized that I had fallen victim to just such a theft.
Hundreds of bytes of my Palm's memory were being perpetually tied up by
a certain software product that I had once tried and then deleted. This
fraud - this 'theft by deception' - has led me to write this evangelical
note in order to make others aware of these on-going criminal acts.
The issue involves software that is marketed using a scheme commonly known
as a 'free trial offer' in which the seller of the software provides you
with a fully-functional version of the product that you can use for a
limited time. After the free trial period, the product will no longer function
until you register it (i.e., buy it), and enter into the product the registration
key that is subsequently sent to you. Of course, if you don't want to resister/buy
the product, you can just delete it, and that's the end of it.... Or is
it? Well, it turns out that this type of 'free trial offer' is not totally
free.
No Free Lunches
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Yes, folks, there is no such thing as a free lunch. You have to pay for
that 'free trial offer', but using a specie that you ordinarily wouldn't
conceive of - memory.
Obviously, such 'free trial offer'-marketed software must keep track of
when you first install and run the product. Then, every time you use the
product, it checks the current date against this timestamp to see if the
free trial period is up. Since the software being offered is fully-functional,
what's to stop you from uninstalling the software, and then re-installing
it to start the clock all over again? If the seller does not prevent you
from doing this, you could potentially use the software for free indefinitely.
Well, the sellers of such software have found one method to guarantee their
income, and it requires that you give up something in return for trying
out their product. The trouble is they don't tell you about this 'cost'.
Instead, they con you, using the word 'free' only in the very limited sense
of 'no monetary exchange'.
Palm's Creator ID System
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When you remove a product on the Palm, the system usually deletes everything
associated with that product - the program itself, its databases, its entries
in the 'Features' manager, its entries in the 'Unsaved Preferences' database,
and, finally, its entries in the 'Saved Preferences' database. The Palm
OS can do this because of a system that used special tags called the Creator
IDs.
Creator IDs are unique to each software product, and are registered with
Palm. Anything that a product 'creates' on your handheld (e.g., databases,
preference, etc.) is supposed to be identified with the Creator ID for that
product so that it can be cleaned up when the product is deleted (as mentioned
above). However, there is nothing to prevent a product from using some other
Creator ID when it creates an item. If it does, that item will not get removed
from your handheld if you delete the product.
These 'remnants' will remain on your handheld indefinitely, tying up the
memory that was allotted to them, until some other process happens to delete
them. In the case of Features, these are removed following a soft reset.
Unsaved Preferences remain until you suffer a hard reset. Hopefully, this
is a very rare occurrence for you, but until you have one, remnants in Unsaved
Preferences tie up memory.
Databases must be deleted manually. You may notice them in the Backup directory
on your PC where all the files in your handheld are hotsync'ed to. They
can usually be seen and removed using the built-in Launcher's
Delete feature. However, unless you look for them, they'll stay around forever.
They'll even get reloaded after a hard reset when you recover from your
PC's backup.
Finally, we come to remnants in Saved Preferences. These are the hardest
to get rid of: You can't 'see' then, and they get restored when you recover
from hard resets. The only way they might get removed is if you do a hard
reset on your handheld, and then reinstall everything from scratch (i.e.,
you don't recover from your PC's backup). And when are you ever likely to
do that?
The Cost of the 'Free Trial'
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The sellers of 'free trial offer'-marketed software use the above discussed
aspect involving Creator IDs to hide the timestamp that they use to expire
the free trial period: They usually hide it in Saved Preferences using a
different Creator ID. That way, even if you delete and then reinstall the
software, the old timestamp is still there and you can't bypass the timeout
feature.
Some sellers are quite sneaky about this, disguising their hidden data using
Creator IDs reserved to Palm OS program such as 'memo' or 'psys'. By doing
so, even if you use special tools to try to find these remnants, you can't
really tell that they were left by the deleted software.
By abusing the Creator ID system of the OS, these products tie up a portion
of your handheld's memory indefinitely. On personal computers, this same
scheme is used, but with a slight difference: The timestamp is left on your
computer's hard disk. When you talk about a hard drive with tens of gigabytes
of storage, the loss in capacity to such remnants is quite small.
However, memory in a PDA is a preciously limited commodity, and tying up
even a small amount can be noticeable. This is especially true when you consider
the cumulative effect of trying out dozens of different software products
over time.
The Issue
~~~~~~~~~
I, for one, have several problems with all of this. First of all, there
is the aspect that such software renders a portion of my handheld (almost)
permanently unusable. Secondly, this is being done without my knowledge
or consent. As such, this legally constitutes theft: The products' sellers
are taking something from me for their own personal gain - to guarantee
their own profits. Finally, because they use the word 'free' to promote
their products when it obviously isn't, such software sellers are guilty
of fraud.
I have heard all sorts of rationalizations on this topic. However, none
of them hold any weight with me.
1. "Software sellers have a right to decide how their software is distributed."
Well, I don't disagree with this entirely. However, it should be followed
by the words "so long as they don't infringe on the rights of the users!"
If you tell me it's "free to try out", and I elect to delete it after trying
it out, I have every right to require that my system be returned to the
state it was in before I tried your product. The word 'free' denotes that
I have every expectation of this.
2. "This marketing strategy is very common in selling commercial software."
Just because other do it doesn't make it right. Again, this is just rationalization
as are the following:
"It doesn't really hurt anyone, so it's okay."
"They'll never notice."
"What they don't know, won't hurt them."
The 'free trial offer' marketing strategy is not the only method available
for promoting software. There are other options open to these people that
do not involve fraud and theft. Demo versions, versions with disabled features,
tiered versions (e.g., basic, deluxe and premium) are industry accepted
methods, just to name a few. The fact that they are trying to make a buck
does not mean that software sellers have a license to con and steal from
the users.
3. "Most people don't have a problem with it."
I strongly disagree with this. Has anyone taken a survey? Just because the
question hasn't been asked, doesn't mean that the answer is favorable.
Consider this: Suppose there was full 'truth in advertising' required for
these 'free trial offer'-marketed products, and that they were required
to provide a disclaimer similar to the following:
If you try this product, it will leave a permanent marker inside your system
that consumes <X> bytes of memory. You won't be able to get this memory
back. This is necessary so that our software can end its 'free trial' period
even if you delete it and reinstall it again.
Quite frankly, if I ever saw such a disclaimer, I would never consider trying
such a product. Would you? You might if you really thought you would buy
the product, but I'm sure you'd be less casual about trying just any such
product.
Without this disclaimer, such products literally fall under the classification
of being Trojan Horses: They cause harmful effects to
users' systems without their knowledge. Trojan Horses are a lesser known
species of detrimental software of which viruses and worms are other species,
and as I'm sure you're aware, there is a whole industry devoted to detecting
and eradicating such detrimental software.
Further, let's say you found remnants left behind after deleting a program,
but those remnants didn't have anything to do with program registration.
Wouldn't it be correct to report to the developer that the program had a
bug in that it didn't clean up after itself? Wouldn't you expect the developer
to correct this bug? Wouldn't you feel justified in deleting such remnants
from your system? Then why is it that in the case where such remnants are
used for program registration, people feel that it is not proper to delete
such remnants, or to tell other about it? Just because it's deliberately
put there so that the seller can make a profit doesn't make it the proper
thing to do.
Practicing Safe Computing
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There is a way you can protect yourself against such software. For PCs,
there are products that detect everything that is installed by other products,
and assist in fully cleaning up when you delete them. I know of one such
product for the Palm OS that I fully endorse. It's called Uninstall Hack,
and can be found on PalmGear:
[old link removed]
I have included version 1.55b of Uninstall Hack with this distribution of
MegaWiki in the 'extras' sub-directory.
Uninstall Hack monitors database and preference activities on your handheld,
and notes any occasions where programs use Creator IDs that differ from
their own. When you remove a program from your handheld, Uninstall Hack
lists any remnants that it leaves behind, and allows you to clean up those
remnants.
Pirating
~~~~~~~~
Some people have protested the publishing of this information, claiming
that it allows users to 'pirate' (however, this is technically an incorrect
term in this case) software that is distributed using the 'free trial offer'
method. By removing the timestamp remnants left behind by such software,
a person can reinstall and use the product indefinitely for free.
I do not, in any way, advocate that others use this information in order
to use commercial software without paying for it. I agree that that would
be wrong.
However, I also condemn software that 'pirates' from users. Anyone that
has every opted out of 'free trial offer' software has a right to be able
to recover all the resources used by seller's product, even if those resources
are used for software registration purposes. Users are under no obligation
whatsoever to participate in the ill-conceived schemes of the seller that
are constructed only for the purposes of helping them make a profit.
I understand that some may think I have done something wrong here, but I
find nothing morally problematic with my exposing this 'dirty little secret'
of software marketing to the world. I feel that this particular practice
is unethical, if not outright illegal.
Further, propagating this information does not prevent software sellers
from making an honest living. As I stated before, there are other avenues
of marketing open to them that are time-tested as well as user-acceptable.
The fact that they chose this particular one - a method that relies on theft
and deceit - reflects poor judgment on their part.
If you don't care about all this, fine. Now that you have the information,
it's your choice what to do with it. At least now you have made an informed
choice, whereas until you read this you were being duped without your knowledge.
For those of you that feel as I do, now that you have the information, you
don't have to just put up with this situation anymore. Now you can do something
about it! There is nothing that forces you to remain captive to the abuses
of software sellers. And please spread the word by passing this information
along to others.
Jerry D. Hedden
Professional Software Engineer
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