[HN Gopher] RunAsDate - Run a program with the specified date/ti...
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RunAsDate - Run a program with the specified date/time (2019)
Author : thunderbong
Score : 102 points
Date : 2021-08-08 14:06 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nirsoft.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nirsoft.net)
| msaharia wrote:
| What a blast from the past! I used runasdate to run a Neural
| Network software using time-lagged RNNs beyond the trial period.
| In my defense, I was a poor undergrad and couldn't afford the
| license fee of the software (Circa 2010).
| weinzierl wrote:
| NirSoft looks legit with a real person (Nir Sofer) behind it. It
| also is around for a long time. Moreover people in this and other
| threads seem to trust NirSoft tools, so I assume they are safe to
| use. It's a pity that whenever I tried they got quarantined by
| enterprise end point security (aka virus scanner).
|
| EDIT: I just sent NirSoft's GDIView, which is the tool I tried to
| use in the past, to virustotal and it sadly gets flagged by two
| vendors. Now that's only two out of about 70. Unfortunately in
| large organizations we have no choice, if it gets detected it
| cannot be used.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Most likely flagged as a generic malware from heuristics
| because of the API calls their tools use.
| rasz wrote:
| 2007
| vxNsr wrote:
| Aside from the trial thing, what's the use case for this?
| biryani_chicken wrote:
| Games that use the system clock to timegate stuff. Nier
| Replicant, for example, uses the system clock for its gardening
| minigame. You have to wait 24 real hours for your plants to
| grow, or change the date in your system.
| FPGAhacker wrote:
| Among other things, I assume for testing your code with date
| handling edge cases like leap years, leap seconds, 2038, etc.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Hmm, I wonder if there's a way to do this for a whole Docker
| container?
| CyberShadow wrote:
| Time namespacing would achieve this, had it not omitted the
| real-time clock:
|
| > Note that time namespaces do not virtualize the
| CLOCK_REALTIME clock. Virtualization of this clock was avoided
| for reasons of complexity and overhead within the kernel.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| Related question, does anyone know of a tool to change the time
| speed of a program. Something like "make the program think an
| hour passed every minute"?
| janci wrote:
| I started Firefox with it set to 2000 and all webpages now have
| blinking and scrolling text!
| sombremesa wrote:
| Those are the Google "warning" banners trying to switch you to
| Chrome. I get them even in 2021!
| 1f60c wrote:
| When would this be useful?
| fiftyacorn wrote:
| Financial quarter ends or year ends
| boba10 wrote:
| We have program registered till date. The software company went
| bust. You run the software with correct time and it runs.
| 0xEFF wrote:
| Unit testing.
| pletnes wrote:
| Or better, integration test where multiple executables are
| involved, making regular in-process mocking unusable.
| ghoward wrote:
| Testing.
|
| Maybe a bug only appears around midnight, or near Easter. This
| makes that easier to reproduce.
| myself248 wrote:
| Gimme gimme gimme? ;)
| ghoward wrote:
| Yep! You got my reference.
|
| For all others, see [1] and [2] .
|
| [1]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-
| does-man...
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15747313
| kburman wrote:
| Run some trail software forever.
| ape4 wrote:
| But not all, the author says: I get many email messages that
| say something like "I tried to extend the trial period of xyz
| software with RunAsDate and it didn't work". Running a
| software with different date/time can be used for many
| legitimate purposes and for these purposes RunAsDate was
| created. I have never said implicitly or explicitly that
| RunAsDate can be used for extending the trial period of a
| software. For some shareware programs, RunAsDate might really
| work, but many shareware creators are smart enough to detect
| that the date/time was modified and when they detect the time
| change, they end the trial period immediately. Please don't
| bother yourself to send me a question about extending the
| trial period of a software, because these kind of messages
| are simply deleted without answering.
| janci wrote:
| I would need RunAsTimezone
| kelnos wrote:
| On Linux (well, glibc, not sure about other libc
| implementations) you can just set the `TZ` environment
| variable before running the app. I wonder if Windows has
| something similar.
| [deleted]
| OJFord wrote:
| Fixing things like:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem
|
| https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
|
| Testing features like:
|
| - night mode
|
| - calendar 'today' visualisation on different days of month
| etc.
|
| Cheating like:
|
| https://smartphones.gadgethacks.com/how-to/hacking-time-spee...
|
| https://www.raymond.cc/blog/how-to-extend-the-trial-period-o...
|
| In that last link, #1 is actually (coincidentally, that wasn't
| in my search) the software submitted here.
| dharmab wrote:
| When your printer can't print on Tuesdays:
| https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619
| tom7 wrote:
| We have proprietary software that was registered until X date
| and the company went bust. Changing the date allows the
| software to run.
| james_in_the_uk wrote:
| If you don't need to worry about updates or litigation, just
| reverse engineer the date check and crack it.
| dharmab wrote:
| Sounds like a use case for Ghidra to be sure.
| curiousgal wrote:
| Back in school we used to use it to run SAS 9.4
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Timed license or something? I've heard of SAS but have never
| used it. Any good?
| curiousgal wrote:
| Yeah, a free trial.
|
| It's a niche statistical analytics programming language.
| Used by banks and pharmaceutical companies mostly because
| it makes it easier to audit things. The open source
| alternative would be R.
| kazinator wrote:
| You might be able to obtain reproducible behavior from a tool
| that insists on putting time stamps into its output, and has no
| options for reproducibility.
|
| You might be able to get an indefinite extension for running
| some time-limited trialware.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Several people have asked in existing threads why you'd want
| this, so, let's give a _very real_ example that we can guess
| probably at least one HN reader will be grateful for:
|
| At the end of next month (September 2021) the root CA certificate
| for DST Root CA X3 expires.
|
| When a new CA comes into existence in the Web PKI they face a
| significant problem, even if all the brand new shiny software
| trusts their excellent new CA root, almost everybody at least
| sometimes needs old software that might not have the latest
| updates. So, they get an existing trusted CA to sign to say that
| _they_ trust this new CA.
|
| The charity that provides Let's Encrypt, ISRG, has a root CA
| named ISRG Root X1 (and a newer one named ISRG Root X2 but that's
| another matter) but they also sought such cross signatures from
| IdenTrust, who had bought the Digital Signature Trust and with it
| DST Root CA X3 in order to "bootstrap" trust on older systems.
|
| So up until late September, a device that has no idea who ISRG
| are or what Let's Encrypt is, still trusts Let's Encrypt
| certificates, because it trusts DST Root CA X3. And then the
| self-signed certificate for DST Root CA X3 expires.
|
| Tools like RunAsDate allow you to test your software to see
| whether it will still work _after_ that expiry date. It wasn 't
| really practical to run such tests a few months ago, because if
| in say May you tell the computer it's now the 1st of October all
| your perfectly _good_ Let 's Encrypt certificates issued in April
| have expired by October, so that's why nothing works. However,
| since early July it has been possible to have certificates that
| will not be expired when DST Root CA X3 expires and perform such
| tests.
|
| Lots of maintainers probably look after systems where they can't
| (or at least, daren't) add a newer root like ISRG Root X1 and
| would value knowing in advance that the system will blow up
| completely at the end of September, rather than being blind-sided
| when it inevitably happens. RunAsDate (and similar tools on other
| systems) enable them to find that out with a few weeks left to
| fix or at least mitigate the problem.
| monkpit wrote:
| I would assume the reason most people would use this is to
| spoof simple "trial period" checks on older software. I
| remember, as a kid, setting the clock back on shareware in
| order to run the full version. This would make it more
| convenient since you don't have to alter system time.
| svnpenn wrote:
| I would like to take this opportunity to note that all NirSoft
| tools are closed source.
|
| Its nice that "Nir" or whoever has made them freely available,
| but when the day comes that they are not updated anymore, because
| of lack of interest, or life changes or whatever, all the effort
| that went into making them is lost to history. No one will be
| able to fork the project, or continue on with the work, as the
| source code was never released.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| It is "Nir" or whoever's work and choice about what license to
| use.
|
| If you wrote a book and some of your readers demanded that you
| let them write the sequels, you might be quite annoyed.
|
| Creators have rights and it is respectful and just to honor
| their choices.
|
| Maybe "Nir" or whoever will release the tools under an open
| source license upon retirement or something, but that is up to
| them.
| guenthert wrote:
| It isn't disrespectful to point out that choice and in fact
| helpful to us consumers who might chose not to bother with
| such software as all too often such became abondonware. I
| recall cases where the author had a disk crash, no back-up
| and then gave up out of frustration or another case where the
| author died untimely.
| theden wrote:
| Is there an equivalent tool for *nix OSes?
| jarenmf wrote:
| faketime '2008-12-24 01:15:43' /bin/date
| marcodiego wrote:
| I like differences between OS philosophies. It allows us to
| see how some things can be done way simpler and highlights
| strengths and weaknesses of different ideas.
|
| Not being a windows guy for a long time, I was impressed that
| windows users were happy when chrome implemented the "print
| to pdf" feature, I said "CUPS let me print to ps or pdf a
| decade ago". Another moment like that was when I showed the
| 'time' command to a student as a crude benchmark for
| algorithms and also using LD_PRELOAD to easily show that his
| code had leaks, then complemented it with valgrind and leak
| sanitizer.
|
| Leak sanitizer is multi-platform, valgrind can be replaced by
| drmemory and, of course, windows has many advantages that
| made it earn the desktop but, at the time, nothing like that
| was close on windows as a quick apt-get.
|
| A trick I usually do these days is when someone argues about
| developing something new. I think about a somewhat similar
| package and "apt-get build-dep" and "apt-get source" it. In a
| matter of minutes I have dependencies for a package, its
| source code, compile and install it. People always get
| impressed at how easy it can be.
| efficax wrote:
| faketime is great. I use it in continuous integration tests
| for some software that needs to work correctly in temporal
| edge cases (near midnight, leap days, etc.)
| amelius wrote:
| Can it also slow down the clock?
| jarenmf wrote:
| Indeed, you can: faketime -f '+2y x0.1' /bin/bash -c 'date;
| while true; do echo $SECONDS ; sleep 1 ; done'
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Used this back in the day, solid tool! Thanks Nirsoft
| lanerobertlane wrote:
| I'd just like to use this comment to show appreciation of
| Nirsoft's stuff. Great useful single function utilities for
| practically anything, for free, without any catch.
|
| Many times I've needed to do something that seems simple but
| isn't exposed easily, and rather than figure it out myself
| there's a gui or cli app that just does exactly what I need.
| folkhack wrote:
| It's so difficult to find trustworthy independent publishers in
| the Windows world and Nirsoft nails it. Tools that are designed
| to empower users with zero strings attached - seriously helpful
| stuff.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Nir's applications are gems. They are extremely lightweight, sane
| and well documented, static, cost nothing and receive regular
| updates (19 released updates since July...) - all by one guy who
| actually answers his emails and blogs excellent content with
| regular frequency (reached out about a library based on one of
| his apps and he took the time to reply and explain the reasoning
| for not publishing as a library).
|
| Really, the only other (windows) applications I can sing the same
| praise for are the sysinternals suite.
| artiszt wrote:
| agreed. on that platform, forced to use it, NirSoft is
| indispensable and like an much appreciated breeze of fresh air
| -- much like Hexfiend and alike, Filebuddy, and BBEdit were
| already under Apple's Classic OS
| myself248 wrote:
| Make use of the "donate" link in the sidebar!
|
| I have no idea how much he brings in from thankful folks like
| us who recognize how much time he's saved us, but it's surely
| not as much as it should be. I set aside a chunk of money every
| year for supporting software authors, and Nir comes up in my
| list every few years.
| sundvor wrote:
| He's like the Stephen King of programming - just extremely
| prolific.
|
| His full list of tools is jaw dropping:
|
| https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/index.html
|
| (The IP tools have been very helpful in the past. I've got a
| new install now and that's a reminder for myself to get set up
| again; will use the donate link too.)
| gompertz wrote:
| This is such a gem indeed! Websites like these, with small,
| bloat free utilities, are gone with the wind it seems. Can
| anyone recommend other similar websites?
| [deleted]
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