Google.com :- The crackers friend (an addition
in May 2001).
Google.com :- The crackers friend (an addition
in May 2001).
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.
AltaVista
Regarded as perhaps the best friend of the reverse engineer. Try using combinations of search parameters, such as +softice +cracking or +softice +version 4.05 or many combinations of each.
When evaluating results its important to look at the last updated date reported by AltaVista, even if the jewel you are searching for appears to be listed on a sites description, look at this date closely, a site last updated in 1997 has probably had the link long removed even if the page remains intact. If you find a site recently updated (and I mean probably no more than 2 weeks ago) then look also at the server address, 'here today, gone tomorrow' uploaders always use the free providers such as FortuneCity/GeoCities/Xoom and such.
Beware also of the scam sites, the ones with 'crackz, warez, long list of application names' in the description, these are probably smut repositories and are not worth the time.
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.
http://directory.netscape.com/
This used to be a good resource back in 2000 however on running some new searches I've seen that the links are now sanitised by commercials and 'Editors Choice' sites, however there are some other notable search engines now available here, e.g. GoTo.com, which produces some fairly useful results (I have not hyperlinked the link since it will inevitably die or expire and my link checking program will have me fixing them again), the following search was conducted using +softice +download.
1. softice.tsx.org
To download softice 4.05 press here or, better, here. To download
softice 4.05 for NT/2000 press here (mirror link).
softice.tsx.org
Unlike Google (see below) GoTo is not such a 'jewel', it requires careful filtering of the results, its links appear old as well, even servers in the East (.ru) are often missing files. Lyco's is also accessible here, it is one of the worst search engines for sanitised results, you may however be able to dig something during the process or get better results by specifying a full filename with extension e.g. softice.zip. Note that the warez releases of such tools, and one assumes most of you will want to retrieve the very latest version, usually have very specific filenames, you may need to source the precise name from one of the dupecheckers.
Nomen est Omen & Other Search Engines
Remember those relocators?, cjb.net/ml.org (now redundant) surf.to/tsx.org etc, prefix these with softice or softice4 and try them, you may be fortunate. Use also the various banner webrings you may see on various sites, check links, use cross links from visited links, you'll find within 4-5 clicks what you are looking for. You might even be able to persuade Yahoo to work for you by using its advanced search capabilities and selecting Web Site Matches, again look at the date of the hits closely before visiting.
Don't be afraid also to try any of the other search engines (there is tremendous concurrence on the web as these portals always advertise), try for instance Dogpile, Google, HotBot, InfoSeek/Lyco's (one of the largest), Northern Lights, WebCrawler and probably 101 others.
Try all of these 4 resources then :-
Links - Try combing/perusing the likes
of Aesculapius, Quantico & ytc's sites.
My Tools page - Maybe I've got what you
need :-).
Player's Tools - A spin-off
from ProTools, very packer/unpacking focused with some good resources
(updated regularly too).
ProTools (Programmers Tools)
- A great tooling site which despite its name has many reverse
engineering tools. Kaparo keeps it pretty up-to-date too.
Now listen up, if you 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 :-).
Lets for example take a little look at how many copies of SoftICE v4.05 we can fetch from the web, the lowercase search string 'softice v4.05' will prove more than adequate. Lets peruse the first few results :-
1. karpoff.9ug.com/herramie.htm : turns out (unfortunately
for the purpose of my illustration to be a 404 ;-) ).
2. http://www.rendo.dekooi.nl/~spyke/cracktoolz.htm : take a note
that any webmaster who names their pages with names like 'toolz'
and 'warez' and so on probably has some banners, this is no exception,
however we can fetch SoftICE from here with a working link.
3. http://www.8bn.com/hambo/tools.html : Hambo (a name from CORE)
and once again some links are on hand.
4. http://crack.yoll.net/index_failai/index_tools.htm : A foreign
page (always look at the brief description and directory structure),
once again though we find some working links.
5. http://www.dacho.co.il/crack/tools.htm : An Israeli site which
links to the files in 4.
6. http://go2.163.com/~dihou/index_cracktools.htm : Yet more working
links.
7. http://www.reversing.net/TOOLS/index_old.htm : A foreign site,
but the links work, its another bad day for NuMega.
8. http://202.103.69.108/winsurf/tools.htm : You guessed it, more
working links.
9. http://209.232.1.56/dataroot/mzenarosa1153/l2c/html/tools/
: A PHP3 based download system, the links however are bad.
So of the first 9 links, 6 lead to SoftICE on the web (I discounted 1 of the sites which had a working link since it was shared). On many of these sites you'll probably also find links to other tools you might need. Just browsing the next 20 links or so some noise was encountered, sites reviewing SoftICE, tutorials using it, some more links.....needless to say I hope the next time you need a certain tool you try Google before the IRC channels ;-).
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