Breaking a protected LISP

[design.9921]

I want to see how a lisp routine works that I have to understand it but it's protected. Is there a way to break these so I can see the functions and to help me better understand how lisp works?

[rkmcswain]

Ask the author of the program, after all the IP belongs to him/her.

[jpaulsen]

There is program out there (UP.EXE) that was given to me back in the 80's. Unfortunately, sometime in the last 5 years I misplaced my copy. Maybe someone else out there has it.

[Ryder76]

In a word - NO. Unless you get the password from the person that protected it you can't get in it. Trust me on this - I went thru much research, questions, pain, discussions on this forum and the Autodesk forum, pain, begging Autodesk to help me, pain all in vain.

My situation was a disgruntled employee that password protected multiple automation programs/routines. When they left they refused to divulge the password. Well, yea I know there is someone somewhere that can break that password just no one willing to do it. I asked Autodesk if they would unlock the files if I sent them to Autodesk. Told them I didn't want any secrets - just the files unlocked. Where they seemed sympathetic to my plight they still refused saying it couldn't be done. Now I'm pretty sure it could have been done they just weren't willing to do it. I imagine out of fear for setting a precedence. I understand, but I'm still not happy about their choice.

Ok - I feel better now. Sorry for another mild rant today yal. Must be the full moon coming this weekend.

[rkmcswain]

IMO - If the work was produced on company time, it belongs to the company and the company has legal rights to obtain the source code. Asking Autodesk and peers for help was the wrong route...

[irneb]

Generally this would be considered cracking which nearly everywhere (except some countries with loose intellectual property laws) is illegal! That is why you won't get any reputable company to do something like this for you ... no matter what the reason may be. It's not a question of them not wanting to divulge secrets, it's more like they want to cover themselves from lawsuits.

You are talking about a passworded code. I'm assuming FAS / VLX? Or is it VBA stuff? Or are you saying it's something different? If it's a LSP file with garble inside it's using one of the old protection scramblers, there's no password to these. And yes there was a unprotect type of program which could descramble them for you. But since AUGI is not a hacker's anonymous site, you won't find that program (or anything similar) here.

The only way you can get this done legally would be through legal channels either getting the password from the disgrunteled employee (through court action). Or after some further procedings (if say this person is not part of breathing society anymore) you may get lucky by having such a crack allowed to be performed by a court desition.

As RK's noted, if anything is done on company time and / or on company owned equipemt / software. It will be deemed the property of such company, not the employee's. That said, it's not always practical to enforce such ... therefore the old IT axiom backup everything! And check up on your employees' work so they don't password protect stuff so the higher-ups can't get at it.