crackzs1.htm: How to search the web, by fravia+ crackzs1

~ Essays ~

				essays

(Courtesy of fravia's advanced searching lores)

Searching for a (very important) program: Softice
by Crackz
published at fravia's searchlores in february 2000

Of course you should buy your own copy of Sice after having tested it... but the more people learn how to use softice, the better: this tool is the alfa & omega for people that need to find out what the heck some software is really doing inside their own PCs...

Searching (basic)

The art of effective web searching is a skill you will need to learn over time (I don't profess to be any good at it myself). As the number of web pages increases it becomes more difficult to find the 'gem' which you are looking for, especially since it is very easy to get sidetracked into doing other things whilst trying :-). To illustrate this I will use this page to show you how to *fetch* all the copies of SoftICE you might ever need using a number of well documented sources. You can assess for yourselves their effectiveness, I will also add my own comments.

FTPSearch - Located in Norway, this FTP search engine can find many hidden directories. Let us start by trying appropriate filenames say 's-ice' & 'softice'. Note that the servers in the East tend to be the best.

1 -rwxrw-r--  162.6K 1996 Dec 13 ftp.icc.ru  /pub/msdos/crack/tools/s-ice280.zip
2 -rwxr-xr-x  162.6K 1999 Oct 29 ftp.ula.ve  /pub/msdos/cracking/s-ice280.zip
3 -rw-r--r--  1.7M   1999 Nov 23 ftp.ocs.ru /pub/Staff/Stuff/borisov/SOFTICE3.ZIP
4 -rwxrwxr-x  2.8M   1999 Apr 7  ftp.cs.kmitnb.ac.th /pub/software/editNcrackutil/softice324.zip

's-ice' successfully nets us 2 copies of SoftICE v2.8 for DOS and 'softice' a copy of SoftICE v3.0 and v3.24. You might get better results by trying other names, this is for illustrative purposes only after all. In my opinion FTPSearch has lost a lot of its appeal from the olden days and is probably now only useful for old archived programs.

Netscape Search

http://directory.netscape.com/Computers/Hacking/Cracking

It doesn't take long from here to find :-

Index of Hex Editors, Disassemblers, Assemblers, Cracking, etc.


brw45.zip          	Aug 16 17:07:42 1999    844469 <-- BRW 4.5.
softice.zip        	Aug 16 17:07:53 1999   1014880 <-- SoftICE v2.0 maybe.
softice3.zip       	Aug 16 17:07:54 1999   1814128 <-- SoftICE v3.0.
softice301w95.exe  	Aug 16 17:07:55 1999   2006913  
softice301wnt.exe  	Aug 16 17:07:57 1999   2047110 <-- SoftICE v3.01.

.....and so it continues.

By just perusing most of the first 20 sites in the list above you ought to be able to find everything you need.

Still Lost?

Now listen up, if you really really can't find what you seek maybe I can help, but please make sure you have exhausted every possibility before asking me and give me plenty of time to reply. Finding me on IRC is easily your best chance of getting some assistance :-).