Apparently, one disgruntled software engineer used a nice little subroutine to be able to punish crackers of his software. Anton Tomov, maker of Pocket Mechanic for PocketPC included some lovely code that basically hard-resets your PocketPC (completely obliterating any software/data/files on it) if you use a cracked serial to register the thing. Hm…somebody’s angry. Read the briefing @ : http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3232
(ref: Engadget)
Make sure you read to about page 4 or 5. The first couple pages are just his supporters. But the last few pages have about four or five users completely bashing his ethics.
Kind of disturbing that that’s still allowed. Still, some people..
Makes me not want to ever buy software again. :evil:
I would have done something different personally, I would have forced a message that appeared everytime you turn on your PPC that reads something like ‘this is stolen, please purchase a legit copy’. Annoying, non-removable till registered correctly, but not malicious.
I know there are some illegal serial # can work pretty well, the program just could not identify them as illegal #s. It just depend on how smart the hackers are.
I think the illegal serial # concept works another way:
The software makers enter all legal serial #‘s given out by them into a database and when someone tries to enter a serial # into the software it would connect to their site and check for the existance of the serial # in their database. If it does not exist, it’s illegal (it could be some other concept also but along similar lines). An obvious workaround to this would be to simply crack the software so that it would never connect to the developer website.
I think the developer has the right to put in whatever measure he wants as long as it doesn’t potentially harm the system. I think the Pocket Mechanic author’s measure was a bit extreme since it had the potential to destroy a person’s data. Of course, i don’t know the specifics on how it works but unless it’s completely fool proof in the case of the accidental entry of a wrong serial then it’s definitely not the best solution.
An annoying shareware message, reduced functionality or disabled functionality is a better way to go. Forcing a hard reset seems too extreme.
[quote author=“gr00vy0ne”]An annoying shareware message, reduced functionality or disabled functionality is a better way to go. Forcing a hard reset seems too extreme.
Agreed. This crosses a line into anti-hacking statute territory. There was a story not long ago about a piece of smartphone software (series 60?) that would place calls and send out SMS messages, eventually costing the user money.
[quote author=“Drachen”][quote author=“tifosiv122”]Essentially, though, don’t you need to sync to install…so the most data anyone lost was 10 mins worth?
No. PPCs don’t sync in the same way as Palms. Backups aren’t automatically made during each sync.
Ah, haha…chalk one up to Palm then…I never worry about installing new apps because I know I have a recent backup.
