DRM and Anti-Piracy

Sounds like something that would make the claims made by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denuvo copy-protection, actually plausible.

This is like some old school prank developers would program in should the software detect it was pirated.

Most DRM ridded games were cracked.

Cracks are for defeating copy protection, so this comment is all kinds of problematic!

Other software with dongle-based protection has been pirated in the past. There will almost certainly be ways of circumventing this protection if software crackers want to do it.

Someone would just NOP out the check and publish a cracked version on the internet, so everyone who can't crack it will be able to download the cracked version.

I would be afraid to use a pirated version of this. Certainly the authors are experts in cracking and countermeasures. They could do sneaky stuff like pretending to work and then breaking later, or silently produce wrong output.I heard a rumor that the cracked version calls home with your identity and blacklists you for life. Don't think it is true though. (Edit: I think what they do is they embed your key into saved files, and if a key leaks, blacklist it such that later versions cannot

this is exactly what adobe trying to do with their easily crackable software :) they want you to think there are no other option available.

You cannot grasp the true form of copy-protection's attack!

The crack protection described in the article was based on the game code being modified... most PC games these days don't need to be modified to be pirated, they are just duplicated accurately enough to appear identical to the original media (usually through drive emulation, ie. daemon-tools). Additionally, modern copy protection also usually incorporates a black list of drive emulation utilities, but these have always been circumvented by pirates. When a new copy-protection tech comes out it of