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Developer Demands Pirate Bay Not Remove Torrent
An anonymous reader writes "This week TPB got a very unusual e-mail. It was a 'Notice of Ridiculous Activity' from a company that had found one of its apps cracked and listed as a torrent on TPB. The app in question is called Memoires, developed by Coding Robots. Memoires is marketed as the easiest way to keep a journal on your Mac. It costs $29.99 to buy after you've enjoyed a 30-day free trial. That, of course, didn't stop someone from cracking the software and making it available for free as a torrent. Dmitry Chestnykh, founder of Coding Robots, noticed the cracked torrent and decided to download it to see what had been done. After using it, he was upset — not because the cracked version was available, but because the cracker (named Minamoto) had done such a bad job of cracking it. The best section of the e-mail has to be this: 'I demand that you don't remove this torrent, so that people can laugh at Minamoto and CORE skills. However, I also demand the[sic] better crack to be made, so that it doesn't cripple the user experience of my beautiful program.'"
Lazy scene groups do this all the time. And they post installation instructions that indicate that they know nothing about *nix systems (and that they assume that "everyone" has a spare Wintel machine available for running their keygen/crack). A favorite of mine was some application that included a file with the extension .bat (non-executable of course) that contained a one-liner along the lines of "echo "127.0.0.1 activation.developer.com" >> /etc/hosts" inside it and the instructions stated that the user should run this "program" by pressing Win-R and typing in the path to the file...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4