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My grandma used to be playing casual games from a certain publisher on her PC. They were all trial versions, though, limited to 30 minutes or so. Turns out, the time left was stored in the registry, and didn’t have any validation – so when a 10 y.o. me made a quick edit, she was left with 4294967295 minutes of trial left.

by andreaven12 minutes ago|

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you were lucky it was an unsigned var..

otherwise you could have gifted a very nasty trial time of -1 minute! a pretty nice anti-addiction feature :-)

by davidwritesbugs9 hours ago|

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Hope she knows she still only has 3million trial days left

by stvltvs4 hours ago|

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Grandson was naive to his grandmother's mortality.

by compsciphd7 hours ago|

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back in the mid to late 90s, I got a trial for compuserve that was a free 2 month trial. I liked it as as they provided dialup PPP access so was able to use it as full time internet access. It wasn't quite "2 months" of access though. It was 1500 hours of access (which in practice > 24*62).

However, their usage accounting software wasn't great. I had it setup to reconnect if the connection dropped, and they didn't do a great job seeing this, so they accused me of using 2-3k hours during those 2 months (should be impossible if always coming from the same #) and sent me a large bill (for the hours used over 1500). They eventually gave in when I showed them it was impossible and they could validate that the calls were coming from the same line due to the connection dropping and being simple reconnections.

by hypercube334 hours ago|

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Heh there was some ad supported dial up Internet I found. you were supposed to download their browser and it'd dial in and work normal enough.

I noticed it created a windows dial up connection. When you launched the browser the login info worked on this. I could just dial their server and save the username and password and use any browser or game normally.

by nonamenoslogan50 minutes ago|

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Was this NetZero? I kind of recall their CDs would do something similar, launch an Ad supported version of Netscape--but if you just copied the Dial-Up connection it made, you could recreate it without the need for the Browser.