| From: | Gerald Mellor |
| Date: | 16 Aug 2000 at 01:38:50 |
| Subject: | Re: Amiga Piracy |
Hi Andy, on 16-Aug-00, you wrote:
>> Who said anything about formatting a hard drive? (that was just a
>> hypothetical solution, I'm not aware of any software that actually
>> does this)
>
> It's been rumoured a few times now and then, for various programs.
> Someone must have done it by now.
But like Neil said, this kind of thing is illegal in the UK. IMO it
amounts to nothing more than vandalism, like the owner of a shop
finding a shoplifter's house and trashing it.
> So there's 2 situations. A corrupted keyfile should either just
> cause the program to fail when it starts, or revert to an
> "unregistered" state. A pirated keyfile would either have to be
> known about by a later version of the program and fail with a
> suitably sarcastic message
This first situation is harmless, I'd like to think this is the way
things would be done.
> or would involve the program contacting
> a server with a list of pirated keyfiles, without you knowing about
> it. Do I need to point out what I think of any software that runs
> off talking to a server without you knowing about it as soon as
> you're online?
That's a good point, it does seem a little invasive. Unfortunately, I
wouldn't be surprised if AmIRC implemented this technique. I'm sure
I've heard of other Vapor products doing similar things (allegedly...
I'm not trying to say anything bad about Vapor here :) If someone
could back me up on this it'd be nice :) Don't pirate copies of
Voyager take you to a webpage that logs your IP, or something?
Regards
Gerry
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