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Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

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Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#101

Post by Dylan16807 »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #54
PreInternet01 wrote: post #29

Congratulations! Having cracked versions out there indicates that your software is both useful and notable, which is a point where many developers would love to arrive at, maybe, one day. As to what to do about it, there are two basic tracks, neither of which is incompatible with the other: 1. The legal route: notifying distribution sites that they're hosting content in violation of copyright law, requesting takedown…

There was a videogame that got famous because it was pirated, it was a management game about setting up a gaming company. Turns out, the pirated copy had a special feature where the player would feel immense economic pressure from piracy, so a bunch of players asked how to win against this, it was pretty hard and really fun for people who knew what was going on. Point is, you could hide an Easter Egg for pirated vers…

That kind of thing is a cute idea but that specific example has always bothered me because it implies the devs really think that piracy is a catastrophe for sales.

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#102

Post by Semaphor »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #54
PreInternet01 wrote: post #29

Congratulations! Having cracked versions out there indicates that your software is both useful and notable, which is a point where many developers would love to arrive at, maybe, one day. As to what to do about it, there are two basic tracks, neither of which is incompatible with the other: 1. The legal route: notifying distribution sites that they're hosting content in violation of copyright law, requesting takedown…

There was a videogame that got famous because it was pirated, it was a management game about setting up a gaming company. Turns out, the pirated copy had a special feature where the player would feel immense economic pressure from piracy, so a bunch of players asked how to win against this, it was pretty hard and really fun for people who knew what was going on. Point is, you could hide an Easter Egg for pirated vers…

Long ago, I helped distribute cracks and reverse engineered servers for warcraft 3 alpha. One of the biggest issues in the cat and mouse game was when blizzard introduced 2 invisible golems that would attack your base. That took the crackers much longer to fix than other updates.

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#103

Post by surfmike »

From a technical perspective, here's a strategy I used in the past: In addition to having a simple activation check in the code, I actually created/identified some constants that are critical to the internal functioning of the code, and hashed with a reversible hash function.

Then, when the user gets activated, I used that as one of two pieces to recover the hash function to decode those secrets.

Still circumventable, but requires more complexity than simply skipping the activation check, because simply omitting some code doesn't cause it to work.

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#104

Post by Eisenstein »

nebula8804 wrote: post #91
ryandrake wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also a note about the dangers of cracked software. There could be malware, viruses, etc. The value becomes much smaller to use something that could ransomware your system. I've always thought this was kind of an old wives' tale FUD. Long time back when I used to hoist the ol Jolly Roger, the pirated versions of software seemed to always be pristine copies. Reputable release groups had their reputation in mind and w…

Problem with pirated movies these days (and for a long time) is that you have so many variations: garbage like different encoding schemes because some loser still watches the films on their DivX player or re-encoded in other methods. Then you have different release groups releasing their own variations and you have to keep on top of all these silly labeling schemes on the filenames. It all leads to clutter on the sce…

Neither of those things you mentioned (poor/strange encoding, silly filenames) are a problem beyond minor inconvenience. Any standard release will be x264 or x265 with AAC or DTS, and a simple program like Filebot will lookup all the files on imdb and rename them for you automatically. It is great to support the industry that makes things you like, but ripping blu-rays is orders of magnitudes more work (I do it though, since I like the commentary tracks, I just wanted to correct your misconceptions).

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#105

Post by ROTMetro »

tlb wrote: post #51
SecurityMinded wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This shows that you have never dealt with companies in 3rd world countries. When money is tight, which is always in those countries, there is not a cheap-enough price that you can make them pay. They want the benefit of the product but they do nit want to pay anything for it. So, a free trial version in those places, will turn into a perpetual "free" trial. Same for "no proof needed" student/academic versions. Unfort…

Yes, people who can't pay will keep renewing the free trial indefinitely. Since you weren't going to get any money out of them anyway, there's no loss. More people using your sw costs you nothing, and has various benefits, including: - if those people someday move to a big company that can afford it, they'll be familiar with your sw - they may blog about it or publish results from it, giving you free advertising - re…

Add then they can unfairly compete with the people that DO pay for your software because their very not having to fairly compensate for the benefits of your labour yet still gain from it puts them ahead of some 'sucker' who pays. I would rather that people willing to steal from me don't compete with my paying customers. Even though their usage doesn't make you less 'whole' it does impact the ecosystem your business operates within.

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#106

Post by ROTMetro »

bdcravens wrote: post #57

Ignore it - you aren't "losing" money unless those customers would have paid you otherwise. Keep focusing on the features and service for those who do pay you.

We are not talking about video games. Business software that gives a company some edge, give the company using your pirated software a greater edge because they don't have the expense that the legitimate company paying for the software does. That is the value, and in this case you are very much 'rewarding' the theif and punishing the 'sucker' who pays you. Why would you do this?

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#107

Post by bonestamp2 »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #29

Congratulations! Having cracked versions out there indicates that your software is both useful and notable, which is a point where many developers would love to arrive at, maybe, one day. As to what to do about it, there are two basic tracks, neither of which is incompatible with the other: 1. The legal route: notifying distribution sites that they're hosting content in violation of copyright law, requesting takedown…

Other options

We had this happen too. In our case, our software required our hardware to function so we put the recurring license on the hardware instead of the software. It's been about 8 years since then and nobody has been able to crack that system yet. Some software that doesn't need hardware also uses a small hardware key to enforce licensing.

Going forward, you could make it so the user has to login to your service when they launch your software. You could provide extra value to your paying customers through this channel too. You would run into some other challenges such as shared passwords, but those have some mitigation strategies too.

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#108

Post by jjeaff »

kobalsky wrote: post #88
bitexploder wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even be cheeky. Detect when the software is cracked (signature/binary hash changed) and message the user “we see your version is corrupt or cracked, you may want to reinstall. If you are using this software without paying for it ”. You can invest some time in obfuscation and more frequent releases, but I would not spend a lot of effort on it.

am I the only one that thinks that the remote possibility of showing this message to a legit customer by mistake outweights any benefit it could bring? you are not gonna guilt anyone into not pirating and if the message blocks or is annoying, crackers are gonna circumvent it just like they did the license check.

A lot of big players like adobe and microsoft don't seem to think this is a problem. In the past I have gotten cracks for legitimately purchased software from both because their licensing system is/was crap and would block access thinking my copy was not valid.

Pretty bad when the pirated versions of your software work better than the legit copy.

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#109

Post by Dylan16807 »

paxys wrote: post #82
jeffwask wrote: post #44

Nothing. Almost all of the research points to piracy having zero impact on sales for example, https://corsearch.com/content-library/blog/does-piracy-impac... It's been shown time and again in gaming no matter what you do people will crack it and your measures to stop them will have more negative impact on your paying customers than it does on pirates, see Denuvo. Honestly, the best thing is probably working on your c…

Denuvo's purpose is to stop piracy for the first few weeks of release, since that is when the bulk of a game's sales happen. No one cares if it gets cracked after that. Many publishers themselves remove Denuvo protection from their games after a set period of time. By those measures it is an incredibly successful and effective piece of software.

Get it to the point that they all remove Denuvo after 90 days and I'll be much less upset about the harm it causes...

Re: Ask HN: We found a cracked version of our software on the web, now what?

#110

Post by kabdib »

PreInternet01 wrote: post #29

Congratulations! Having cracked versions out there indicates that your software is both useful and notable, which is a point where many developers would love to arrive at, maybe, one day. As to what to do about it, there are two basic tracks, neither of which is incompatible with the other: 1. The legal route: notifying distribution sites that they're hosting content in violation of copyright law, requesting takedown…

When I was working on video game cartridges, I discovered that one of my neighbors in my apartment building was a prolific pirate. I introduced myself and we had some fun chats.

The Atari 800 cartridge address range could be populated with RAM, and cartridge images simply copied to RAM and run. Copy protection techniques usually involved figuring out sneaky ways to write to that address range (which would crash an image running from RAM).

Toward the end of one project, I spent about two weeks writing an encrypted, multi-stage anti-copy system. A few months after the game shipped, I asked my pirate "friend" about it.

"That was a hard one," he said, "It took us nearly three days to crack it."

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