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I used many programs, called "trials", which stopped working after 30 days. So it does not let me use it, while the program itself is on my hard drive, with all

I used many programs, called "trials", which stopped working after 30 days. So it does not let me use it, while the program itself is on my hard drive, with all resources necessary to run that program. But the computer belongs to me, and the content of a hard drive too. And the OS should do what I want it to do. Should I report it as a bug to the creators of my OS? If it's fixed once in the OS, the solution is universal. So that since I downloaded a program to my computer, the OS should make it run every time.

wtallis 7y ago
Stop and think about what specific techniques a program might be using to prevent the trial version to continue to run after 30 days. If it needs to phone home to the vendor's servers each time you launch the program, then there's not much the OS can or should be able to do to get in the way of that. You can redirect traffic to your own server that's impersonating the vendor's authentication server, but they can use cryptography to defend against that kind of attack. But if it's trying to place an undeletable file on your system or something like that (eg. in your boot sector, TurboTax style) to keep track of how many times you've launched the program, then your OS absolutely should protect you from such misbehaviors.