Pirate Pocket Mechanic, get your data booty plundered, matey
posted Feb 7th 2005 7:00AM
Ahh, where software pirates meet apps that fight back; it's some serious legal gray-area over there, a place where stealing your software could get you anything from a stern warning message to a dead application install—or in some cases (if the developer is just sick and tired of people stealing their work) a wiped machine. Anyone remember CDRWin? If you gave it a pirated serial it would just take it without question and punish you by spitting out bad CDs all the time. Well, a bit more harsh is the maker of Pocket Mechanic, Anton Tomov, who programmed his app to hard reset (i.e. cause total data loss on) the Pocket PC of anyone with a blacklisted or artificially generated serial. Bitter, yes, but we're not prepared to say it's entirely unfair; unless it wipes the Pocket PCs of the innocent, in the wild west of tech you take your gear into your own hands with illegal software.
Fair or not fair... it causes damage to property and is illegal. The last thing we need is some vigilante deciding over the fate of unrelated equipment and programs.
This is the reason why convenience store owners don't get to chop the hands of shoplifters.
Apparently it's already been discounted, Anton himself claims it's simply not true.
http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/index.php?action=expand,37285
I really hope it's not true, as this is a truly low form of software engineering. Although there's obviously no real standard to follow, I really believe programmers have a moral duty to do no harm, sort of like doctors :P
Anton's replies in his own forum make it pretty evident that he is scum. When asked whether or not version 1.50 contains the "trick" he avoids answering, going on to claim that 1.51 has never contained any kind of malware. For me this is reason enough to never buy his products again. People have tested it with 1.50 and lost all their data.
Anton may claim it's not true but he could have been referring to the, recently released, version 1.51. Someone tested 1.50 and it does exhibit the hard reset "feature":
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=14483&postcount=15
Me-thinks the only difference between the two is the commenting out of the hard reset code.
I wouldn't buy any app that had code like this - even if I was using a legit serial, I wouldn't feel that I could trust it.
"Self-help," as this is referred to in the law, is not allowed, the same way you can't go and take your stuff back if you are robbed and know who did it. As of a few years ago, no case of self help had been proven in court, but a few judges have warned that anyone who engaged in it would be liable for some hefty punative damages.
Anton released 1.51 quickly after the discussion of 1.50 hard resetting started and, from my understanding, it can hard reset your system even if you purchased 1.50 legally. It checks to see if old installs of Pocket Mechanic use bad serials. If it finds one, goodbye data.
Has anyone here reinstalled a copy of a program that they own, but couldn't find their serial, so you looked up one online? I know I have.
This same topic was discussed over at jkontherun http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/2005/02/use_an_illegal_.html
a few days ago, and the majority of people, including myself, think that the practice of destroying data is despicable and likely illegal.
A similar thing occurred with a piece of software for the mac (a video editing app, I believe) back in Sept 2004.
The developers of great Mac software at Unsanity weigh in about that instance, and I feel that most developers agree. A very interesting read:
http://www.unsanity.org/archives/000361.php
Bhavesh
I'm not a developer, but I'd like to see more good software developed for pocket pc and I think punishing piraters is a great idea.
....so thats why my copy of cdrwin never worked ;) bastards!
I feel for the developers who are getting their software pirated, but this is the wrong way to go about preventing it. What happens when people accidently mistype the serial? That happens all the time to everyone. I personally would just avoid using software with this "security", and I think it's going to cause any developer who uses it more lost sales than if he were to release without these measures.
It is funny how Mr Tomov tried to deny the allegations that there was such code in his product Pocket Mechanic. At http://www.mobileread.com there someone even posted a disassembly snippet (removed by some admins due to copyright issues?) that showed that the hard reset routine was present several times (4) in Pocket Mechanic.
What do you think Tomov was most afraid of? The bad press or the legal consequences of his actions?
JA - A good programmer should include a checksum into their keys. ISBN numbers use it, and most game developers use it.
The Wikipedia ISBN page has a nice writeup on it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN
There was a similar situation a few years ago when a developer made the claim that if the software detected that it was a pirated copy, it would erase the user's hard drive... then denied it...
Unfortunatly for him, that's exactly what happened to one of his customers who had a legal copy... who then sued him for destruction of private property... and won.
It's not even clear that the software creator has a right to erase their own software, but erasing someone else's data - no matter what - is destruction of private property, which is held to be a bigger crime than software piracy.
It's also amazingly unprofessional.