Notice this last one: an application of the above principle, basically a one-line web page that calls the compiled AppletKiller.class (watch it, this thing makes your system very unstable) from the hard-drive. The rest of them are pretty standard, your typical useful web pages...

3. The Menus

But we are not done yet; there are still a couple of useless menus lurking around here (Look at your Netscape window: "Directories" once again and also "Help", both of which use URLs to define their actions)...you'll find their strings between 65000-65399, though I would suggest editing only the URLs and changing the menus directly by editing the Menu2 resource through BRW. The menus originally look as follows:

Directory:

These will never do. I opted to keep the layout of the separators, though by all means I could have added or removed a few, and went with the following layout:

Cracking:

Resources:

Ah, much better. Once more now, theory into practice, by using the file:/// tags to access files on my hard drive. To get this to work right, you have to set the Netscape action for ".exe" to "Launch this application:" with the application field left blank. This will give you a SaveAs... box when you click on one of the "file:///" menu items (i.e., NetInfo); if you press OK, the .exe will save, and if you press CANCEL, the .exe will run (we could disable the box, but then you could never save .exe's that you downloaded...).

To top it all off, I shuffled around the main items in Menu2 so that my menu bar now reads File...Edit...View...Go...Cracking...Resources...Bookmarks...Options...Window: perfecto! Now you just need to change the title bar to Crackscape....

4. Notes about the Registry

The obvious place to look for the URLs linked to each button and menu item would have been the Registry, and this was in fact the first place I checked. As shown above, however, the string values are hard-coded in the executable itself. Netscape does keep a number of interesting values in the Registry, all of them in

HKey_Current_User\Software\Netscape\Navigator

It is generally a good idea to locate things like URL history and Cache in a temp directory that gets deleted at bootup; these files will all re-create themselves. Cookies.txt, however, cannot be replaced with a nonexistent file; the last time I tried that I went to microsoft.com to test it and my computer GPF'd so hard that soft-ice only showed a column of "FFFFFF: INVALID" opcodes when I tried to pull out of it....

There's not much to sum up in this essay, unless it is to point out how simple it is to customise these programs with a good resource editor. Strings are by all means a good starting point in reverse-engineering or cracking a program; if you follow any one of the "http:" strings through W32Dasm, you'll find that the first or second call following, leads to the "URL Parsing" routine, an interesting routine which is referenced by about a hundred different lines of code.

As a note of interest, I did the work on this project twice, once with BRW, once with Symantec Resource Studio; both were equal until I juggled the menus, which then did NOT link to the URLs in the Symantec version. This is not to put down Resource Studio as an editor: in fact, it allows me to edit at least some of explorer.exe while BRW flat-out crashes. But it is more food for thought; some day we may have to "repair" these tools....

Mammon_