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re: Question about 'Change the Registered User Information'
Tuesday, July 9, 2002 at 7:36 pm
Windows 95 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by The Doctor
(6 messages posted)
Ty Ciaran. The first answer was in another post, mainly answering Eric Pavels, but
something else has occurred to me. I'd noticed the volume serial number of the primary
the OS is installed on imprinted several times, partly in User.exe, and elsewhere,
though I forget where, to be honest. I just remember needing a serial number to last
beyond a reformat once, and decided that life was too short to root for all the places
once I'd found about five. There were several, as I say.. I just did a sector edit
to get the number from the old drive into the new one immediately after formatting,
and let the OS installer copy that where it liked.
I bring this up because it may be that this did not get stopped in later OS's. Admittedly
it can't be used to track a person much, but it does help build up some kind of profile
of a single user's machine. Far more insidious is the GUID I have just learned about.
:) That is often generated in the saving of documents made by M$ programs, and contains
the MAC address of the network card in the machine. This can link the originator
of a document to records held by the ISP, and cookies have been used to transmit
this info to any site owner who knows the appropriate ActiveX control.
Basically, there are so many ways to track and profile people that it's not even
worth being paranoid. Just assume 'they' might be watching, and don't do anything
to make it worth their while. Works for me, anyway. :)
On Tuesday, July 9, 2002 at 2:28 am, Ciaran wrote:
>Just for kicks, and because I have access to a wide variety of OSes, I decided to
>try testing all of them to see where I could find the Registered Owner name. Here's
>what I found...
>
>Windows for Workgroups 3.11: Found (both in USER.EXE and SERIALNO.INI)
>Windows 95 (OSR2): Found
>Windows 98SE: Not found
>Windows NT 4.0: Not found
>Windows 2000 Pro: Not found
>Windows XP Pro: Not found
>
>I searched using both regular ASCII and Unicode, to make sure that I didn't miss
>anything... so I think it's safe to say that by no means will you *definitely* find
>it in USER.EXE, as you imply. They seem to have stopped doing it after Windows 95.
>:)
>
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 |  | | |  | re: Question about 'Change the Registered User Information' (The Doctor: Tue, Jul 9, 2002, 7:36 pm) |
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