Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!ccplumb
From: ccplumb@watmath.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: About Software Piracy! (software that bites back)
Message-ID: <16257@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Date: 11 Jan 88 21:16:25 GMT
References: <2308@crash.cts.com> <4362@garfield.UUCP>
Reply-To: ccplumb@watmath.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb)
Distribution: na
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 42
Confusion: U. of Waterloo, Ontario

In article <4362@garfield.UUCP> john13@garfield.UUCP (John Russell) writes:
>In article <2273@crash.cts.com> haitex@pnet01.cts.com (Wade Bickel) writes:
>>	  Furthermore, if done correctly, a program could notice if it
>>	were operating without it's dongle and subtly torpedo the pirate.
>
>True story-
>
>Me showing a potential customer a calculator program for the C64, from
>Pioneer Software (booting from the original disk, of course):
>
>"The reason the words 'SECURITY VIOLATION' are flashing all over the screen,
> and the program is locked up, is... ah..."
>
>Didn't sell it. I believe it went in the trash.

It's like a story I once heard about Microsoft.  May be apocryphal, but
could easily happen.

Once, a junior programmer put a routine into the copy protection
Microsoft used in all its products.  It printed a `cute' message when
it detected it was being booted from a crudely copied disk.

Then, one day, a legitimate and naive user of some program got a
damaged master disk.  He tried to boot with this thing, and the copy
protection didn't find the proper magic sector or whatever.

On the screen appeared:

	The tree of evil bears bitter fruit.

	Now trashing program disk.

It didn't actually *do* anything, but, since the disk was bad, it
seemed like it had carried out its threat.  Boom!  Microsoft now
has one *very* irate ex-customer.

Now can you imagine this happening with a virus?  Like the ProLok people
once threatened?  Disclaimer or no, they're gonna end up in court.

Let's keep this silliness with IBM, where it belongs.
--
	-Colin (ccplumb@watmath)