UltraISO is a
crippleware
Crippleware has been defined in realms of both computer software and hardware. In software, crippleware means that "vital features of the program such as printing or the ability to save files are disabled until the user purchases a registration ke ...
application for
Microsoft Windows for creating, modifying and converting
ISO image
An optical disc image (or ISO image, from the ISO 9660 file system used with CD-ROM media) is a disk image that contains everything that would be written to an optical disc, disk sector by disc sector, including the optical disc file system. ...
files used for
optical disc authoring
Optical disc authoring, including DVD and Blu-ray Disc authoring, is the process of assembling source material—video, audio or other data—into the proper logical volume format to then be recorded ("burned") onto an optical disc (ty ...
, currently being produced by EZB Systems.
Initially UltraISO was
shareware however since 2006 it has turned into
commercial software
Commercial software, or seldom payware, is a computer software that is produced for sale or that serves commercial purposes. Commercial software can be proprietary software or free and open-source software.
Background and challenge
While sof ...
. The 'Free Trial' version is limited to ISO images of 300 MB or less, effectively making it
Crippleware
Crippleware has been defined in realms of both computer software and hardware. In software, crippleware means that "vital features of the program such as printing or the ability to save files are disabled until the user purchases a registration ke ...
.
ISZ format
UltraISO uses a proprietary format known as ISZ. The format is advertised as "ISO Zipped", even though it is not a simple zip archive. The format uses
zlib
zlib ( or "zeta-lib", ) is a software library used for data compression. zlib was written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compression program. zlib is also ...
or
bzip2 to compress the data, and may use
AES-128,192 or 256 encryption in the
CBC mode
(note that this provides no integrity protection and is vulnerable to the
padding oracle attack
In cryptography, a padding oracle attack is an attack which uses the padding validation of a cryptographic message to decrypt the ciphertext. In cryptography, variable-length plaintext messages often have to be padded (expanded) to be compatible w ...
). The file format specification is available publicly on EZB Systems's website.
The format is now supported by third party applications such as
Daemon Tools
DAEMON Tools is a virtual drive and optical disc authoring program for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS.
Overview
DAEMON tools was originally a successor of ''Generic SafeDisc emulator'' and incorporated all of its features. The program claims ...
,
Alcohol 120%
Alcohol 120% is a disk image emulator created by Alcohol Soft. It can create and mount disc images in the proprietary Media Descriptor File format. Images in this format consist of a pair of .mds and .mdf files. Alcohol 120% can also convert im ...
and
CDemu.
See also
*
List of optical disc authoring software
This is a list of optical disc authoring software.
Open source
Multi-platform
* cdrtools, a comprehensive command line-based set of tools for creating and burning CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays
* cdrkit, a fork of cdrtools by the Debian project
* cdr ...
*
Live USB
A live USB is a portable USB-attached external data storage device containing a full operating system that can be booted from. The term is reminiscent of USB flash drives but may encompass an external hard disk drive or solid-state drive, th ...
*
Comparison of ISO image software
This article is a comparison of notable software applications that can access or manipulate disk image files. It compares their disk image handling features.
Comparison criteria
This article compares two features: Supported file formats and ca ...
References
External links
*
Official UltraISO Russian club
2002 software
Windows-only shareware
Optical disc authoring software
Disk image editors
Disk image emulators
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