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From: thor@wookumz.ai.mit.edu (Victor Salaman. Ray Cromwell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Pirates and swapware
Summary: serial numbers, they can be defeated
Message-ID: <9240@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 27 Jun 90 08:02:23 GMT
References: <1990Jun24.075559.13459@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <90176.155439ESDYKE@MTUS5.BITNET> <1990Jun27.002024.27364@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG>
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   All this talk of serial numbers has given me the impression that some people
think software pirates are people who somehow get a copy of the original
software disk and 'copy' it with a program or hardware. And this simply
isn't true. Most pirated software is cracked(broken) by European pirate
groups who remove protection. Serial number protection is the easiest to
remove. There are atleast 100 European crack groups, most of them very
dedicated. An example of their dedication to cracking, is a while ago I saw
a cracked version of space ace from readysoft floating around on bbses, and
the file description said the entire disk based protection system was
rewritten, along with the animation and compression loader routines. This must have took alot of work to do. So certainly, no serial number is going to
prevent a challenge. Lots of these European groups make stunning demos,
which shows their programming ability. I attended a 'user' group meeting
once, and was marvelled by some of the technical sophistication of pirates.
 Most of the software had been cracked, cheated, and sometimes the graphics
were even changed, and it was mass copied by duplication hardware w/ lots
of onboard ram. (this was years ago, on a C64)

 I don't like copy protection, and I think its a waste of time, no security is 100% full proof and if sooner or later if the demand is large enough, some
hacker is going to set down and remove the protection from software.

 Also, with the serial number system, what prevents someone from buying
software, copying it, and returning it (that way the copy till runs on
the original machine)

 Sorry to sound so pessimistic, but I always beleive that if someone wants something bad enough, they will get it done somehow.

-Ray