Independent Developers Fight Piracy & Lose

An anonymous reader writes "The author of the Echelon decided to take his fight against software piracy to the next level and then threw in the towel. After someone began posting new serial numbers on a well known hacking site, the author took matters into his own hands. With version 1.0, entering a hacked serial number causes the software deleted the user's Home directory. Yes, you read it right, the software completely erases it (aka rm -rf ~). A variety of people have voiced some some strong opinions on this. While some argue that piracy is good for established companies, a few large companies are battling piracy and having limited success. Small, independent developers, however, are recognising this is a serious problem and are generally stumped by what to do about it."

Comments

Oh dear...

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine the developers face when he realizes that he forgot a ! in his if statement, while testing that piece of code.

A Better Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of deleting the files, they should encrypt the files.

The decryption key will be provided when the product is registered. :-)))))))

-Mike

Not portable

[Kippesoep]

Deleting a user's home directory is a bad idea. It's not portable. How about those poor folks running Windows 9x. They don't have proper home directories. Even the ones in WinXP are half-baked. You'd have to build in a routine that'll erase the C:\ drive for those poor saps.

Typo in the headline!

[jvmatthe]

Should read;

"Independent Developers Fight Piracy & Lose Your Data".

The original version said "...Lose Your Pr0n Collection" but it was too long. The new shorter version is too terse.

A New Slogan

[MankyD]

Echelon - Redifining the Meaning of BOFH (or perhaps BDFH?)