Fwd: Re: Removing password from processing table???

[Mike Schwartz]

> Bud, I have taken down the page and information off of my website.  I will

> keep it to myself as I have for the last 2 years since I needed to remove
the

> passwords off my own code.

> 

> Best Regards,

> Dave

 

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     Passwords are becoming more of an issue for me every year, due to
programmers leaving their jobs, retiring, and, yes, dying suddenly.  (Sorry
to inform some of the people on this list that they ARE mortal.  Except for
whoever it was whose customers wanted to have a laptop and phone line
installed in his coffin...)

 

     I'm currently faced with several customers with passworded, tokenized
code that nobody knows the passwords to.  

 

     Up until a couple of months ago, I knew fpTech could remove passwords
on the maps, but I was surprised to find out that they could remove the
passwords on tokenized tables.  I wish I had known that a few years ago...  

 

     As far as the code that I've written, I've tried to be careful to leave
all the passwords in safe places for all my customers in case anything ever
happens to me.  However, my customers have very bad habits when it comes to
keeping stuff like that.  Last fall at one of my customers in Northern
Wisconsin, an over-zealous new bookkeeper decided to clean the offices while
the owner was in Chicago.  She threw away anything that "looked old", which
included all the filepro manuals and my documentation going back to 1983,
INCLUDING the sheets of passwords.  Now I can't even get into some of my old
code.  Thankfully, I had ABE=Ascii turned on for most of the code, so it is
relatively easy to strip off the passwords.

 

    I had one customer in Boston who gave up on filePro because I told them
that without the passwords, I couldn't make the changes in their code that
they needed.  (Yes, they definitely did own all their code.  It was
completely legal.)  The filePro community certainly doesn't need to
needlessly lose customers because of lost passwords. 

  

    One customer in Cincinnati was VERY pleased a couple of months ago when
I told them that passwords COULD be removed, because they want to upgrade
their filePro and move off of SCO to Linux.  They were unable to do this
because their passworded filepro code has a lot of routines that control
their printers and do other functions, so the code only works on older
versions of SCO Openserver.

 

    It is a tedious, costly process to zip up the files and send them all to
fPtech to have passwords removed, so I am going to test the method you
suggested in your PDF.

 

    I agree that knowledge like this should be "closely held" and every
attempt should be made to make sure it only falls into the hands of those
who legitimately have a need to know.   However, the flip-side of the coin
is that companies don't have a right to block you from enjoying the media
(or programming) that you have paid for.  

 

    NOW:  Does anybody know how to remove the passwords off of some really
old PKzip files???  

 

Mike Schwartz

 

 

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