UnWrapper GOTD

Most of you by Now will have heard of the website Giveaway of the Day and how it operates. For those that don’t know, this long running website gives out a free piece of shareware or commercial software every day completely free of charge. You have to download the program’s zip file from their website and run a setup.exe inside which contacts their server and then lets you run the installer. The major catch is the zip file has to be downloaded and the setup file executed within the 24 hour period of it being released, once outside this time the software can no longer be installed. In the past though, there have been ways to get around this.

The setup and activation procedure did have a major shortcoming which was the original installer extracted itself from the setup.exe wrapper after successfully contacting the server within the 24 hour period. The installer stored itself in the Windows Temp folder and could easily be copied, then you had the real installer ready to use any time you wanted to. To make things easier a couple of utilities were released called Giveaway Forever and GAOTD Setup Keeper which helped to automate the whole process.

Unfortunately these tools Currently don’t work because in mid 2012, Giveaway of the Day changed its wrapper and now the original installer file doesn’t get stored in your Temp folder anymore. This new wrapper is more secure to stop you keeping the software for future installs and is also quite controversial because it’s based on Themida which is Similar to the technology used in rootkits. This put a lot of people off GAOTD, partly because of Themida and partly because they couldn’t keep the installers anymore, and also there are newer competitors around like Glarysoft’s daily giveaways. There are still users who would like to keep some GAOTD giveaways if only there was a way around this new Protection…