How your keycodes get onto a warez site..
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So for anyone who is interested in how a license key gets onto one of those piracy sites I can now speak from experience: On September 11th we get an order for one license of our software. We email the unique license key to the address provided. Last weekend hits to download our software on our website go through the roof, 1000 times more than normal. We backtrack the link and find it's a Chinese site that does nothing but provide license keys, cracked versions of software etc. We find that a link has been placed to our software with the license key and regto name 4 days after it was purchased. We get pissed off, immediately update the download to not work with the keycode in question, problem is that hundreds and hundreds of people have already downloaded and our software is mirrored at tucows which takes forever to update. They continute to download at an astonishing rate, we're over 7GB of bandwidth on Sunday alone. There can't possibly be this many people actually interested in the software, I get the feeling that they are people that would download anything if it's free. We can't simply move the file on our site to break their link, it's linked to by thousands of shareware sites, tucows etc. Our isp tries all day to block anyone coming in with the referrer of this chinese cracker site, ultimately manages to only cause everyone coming to any page on our site to get a permission denied and finally gives up and can't do anything about it. (it's an IIS server, not unix). Mean while, while all this is going on, we contact our lawyers, they start rubbing their hands together, I realize this is going to cost a lot of money so we opt to try to sort it out ourselves. We call the Canadian and U.S. big anti software piracy groups. They basically laugh at us and say give is $5,000.000 to sign up and we'll take a look at it. At this point I'm even more pissed off so I decide it's time to just phone and find out what's going on. I phone the credit card owner, they have no idea what our software is and it turns out have many other charges they didn't authorize. (note, this is a nice older couple, no chance they did this, their credit card info was stolen). I phone the person who we emailed the license key to, he works in another state entirely from the credit card owner, turns out their network was hacked into and our software wasn't the only one that was stolen through thier network and email, they have sinced patched and have kept all the records for any criminal investigation.
While download.com and the like were useful a couple of years ago, they don't make sense these days (google results, ad words, ...) and they add even more pain than predicted since, as you said, they basically mirror versions of your software that you are willing to retire. When you knw that, on top of that, download.com requires authors to pay only to upload the software, it makes me wonder whether download sites are gone nuts at all. Don't be disgusted, in your next software product, keep a central download site, and upgrade often your product with new keycodes (especially if it's popular).
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I've thought about this and I think Microsoft has the best scheme. Make the user activate...once they've activated, make sure you have their IP, hardware config, etc. Hey, they're already downloading your software...what's a few minutes more online for an activation process, eh?
Hawaian shirts and shorts work too in Summer. People assume you're either a complete nut (in which case not a worthy target) or so damn good you don't need to worry about camouflage... -Anna-Jayne Metcalfe on Paintballing
As much some people will say it's an invasion to their privacy, live online activation is the future against software piracy... M$ got a lot of heat when they used it for Windows XP, but now Adobe and some other companies are using this technology. --------------- Tired of Spam? InboxShield for Microsoft® Outlook® 2K/2K2/2K3 http://www.inboxshield.com
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Thanks for sharing this with us, Can Visa really pursue an investigation into China ? John Cardinal wrote: On September 11th we get an order for one license of our software. We email the unique license key to the address provided. err.. could it be ....al-Queda :omg:
Vivek Rajan wrote: Can Visa really pursue an investigation into China ? Probably not, but who knows where the person that did it originally came from. I doubt it was China. And we found that the keycode originated through a usenet newsgroup then ended up on a number of sites, that one was the worst. The others all respected a DMCA notice I emailed them, but the Chinese site is a problem and everyone I've talked to agrees that it's pretty much hopeless to go after a chinese site. Vivek Rajan wrote: err.. could it be ....al-Queda Heh heh, they have an odd interest in business software if that's the case. No, it's probably done like this: Someone who is interested in our software posts on usenet a request for a crack or keycode for our software. Some punk somewhere takes it as a challenge and the rest is history. Why the perpetual usenet cracking newsgroups aren't shut down is a mystery to me, they seem quite able to shut down newsgroups for other reasons or at least limit them. My next project is to find out how Usenet works and if there is anyone in control of it. Probably a waste of time but who knows, you never know unless you try and there are a lot of very big software publishers affected on those newsgroups so maybe they can help.
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While download.com and the like were useful a couple of years ago, they don't make sense these days (google results, ad words, ...) and they add even more pain than predicted since, as you said, they basically mirror versions of your software that you are willing to retire. When you knw that, on top of that, download.com requires authors to pay only to upload the software, it makes me wonder whether download sites are gone nuts at all. Don't be disgusted, in your next software product, keep a central download site, and upgrade often your product with new keycodes (especially if it's popular).
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As much some people will say it's an invasion to their privacy, live online activation is the future against software piracy... M$ got a lot of heat when they used it for Windows XP, but now Adobe and some other companies are using this technology. --------------- Tired of Spam? InboxShield for Microsoft® Outlook® 2K/2K2/2K3 http://www.inboxshield.com
LukeV wrote: MS got a lot of heat when they used it for Windows XP, but now Adobe and some other companies are using this technology. And others have been using it for years.
David Wulff The Royal Woofle Museum
"I live very much in the real world, it's just not the same world shared by most other people"
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As much some people will say it's an invasion to their privacy, live online activation is the future against software piracy... M$ got a lot of heat when they used it for Windows XP, but now Adobe and some other companies are using this technology. --------------- Tired of Spam? InboxShield for Microsoft® Outlook® 2K/2K2/2K3 http://www.inboxshield.com
LukeV wrote: live online activation is the future against software piracy... How so? There are Windows XP pirate copies all over the internet.
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As much some people will say it's an invasion to their privacy, live online activation is the future against software piracy... M$ got a lot of heat when they used it for Windows XP, but now Adobe and some other companies are using this technology. --------------- Tired of Spam? InboxShield for Microsoft® Outlook® 2K/2K2/2K3 http://www.inboxshield.com
LukeV wrote: live online activation is the future against software piracy It will be (already is) cracked, like any other protection. It's the never ending fight of the shield against the sword
In every work of genius we see our own rejected thought. - François Rabelais
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Vivek Rajan wrote: Can Visa really pursue an investigation into China ? Probably not, but who knows where the person that did it originally came from. I doubt it was China. And we found that the keycode originated through a usenet newsgroup then ended up on a number of sites, that one was the worst. The others all respected a DMCA notice I emailed them, but the Chinese site is a problem and everyone I've talked to agrees that it's pretty much hopeless to go after a chinese site. Vivek Rajan wrote: err.. could it be ....al-Queda Heh heh, they have an odd interest in business software if that's the case. No, it's probably done like this: Someone who is interested in our software posts on usenet a request for a crack or keycode for our software. Some punk somewhere takes it as a challenge and the rest is history. Why the perpetual usenet cracking newsgroups aren't shut down is a mystery to me, they seem quite able to shut down newsgroups for other reasons or at least limit them. My next project is to find out how Usenet works and if there is anyone in control of it. Probably a waste of time but who knows, you never know unless you try and there are a lot of very big software publishers affected on those newsgroups so maybe they can help.
John Cardinal wrote: Probably not, but who knows where the person that did it originally came from. I doubt it was China. Don't be so quick to dismiss China. When Microsoft, IBM, et al look into where most of their pirated software is coming from, China always comes to mind.
Five birds are sitting on a fence. Three of them decide to fly off. How many are left?
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So for anyone who is interested in how a license key gets onto one of those piracy sites I can now speak from experience: On September 11th we get an order for one license of our software. We email the unique license key to the address provided. Last weekend hits to download our software on our website go through the roof, 1000 times more than normal. We backtrack the link and find it's a Chinese site that does nothing but provide license keys, cracked versions of software etc. We find that a link has been placed to our software with the license key and regto name 4 days after it was purchased. We get pissed off, immediately update the download to not work with the keycode in question, problem is that hundreds and hundreds of people have already downloaded and our software is mirrored at tucows which takes forever to update. They continute to download at an astonishing rate, we're over 7GB of bandwidth on Sunday alone. There can't possibly be this many people actually interested in the software, I get the feeling that they are people that would download anything if it's free. We can't simply move the file on our site to break their link, it's linked to by thousands of shareware sites, tucows etc. Our isp tries all day to block anyone coming in with the referrer of this chinese cracker site, ultimately manages to only cause everyone coming to any page on our site to get a permission denied and finally gives up and can't do anything about it. (it's an IIS server, not unix). Mean while, while all this is going on, we contact our lawyers, they start rubbing their hands together, I realize this is going to cost a lot of money so we opt to try to sort it out ourselves. We call the Canadian and U.S. big anti software piracy groups. They basically laugh at us and say give is $5,000.000 to sign up and we'll take a look at it. At this point I'm even more pissed off so I decide it's time to just phone and find out what's going on. I phone the credit card owner, they have no idea what our software is and it turns out have many other charges they didn't authorize. (note, this is a nice older couple, no chance they did this, their credit card info was stolen). I phone the person who we emailed the license key to, he works in another state entirely from the credit card owner, turns out their network was hacked into and our software wasn't the only one that was stolen through thier network and email, they have sinced patched and have kept all the records for any criminal investigation.
John, One piece of advice I want to give you: Have the ability to disable any activation key at any time. This is a golden feature and it will give you great satisfaction using it when someone cracks or leaks an activation key. Also you can fool hackers into thinking that they have broken your key. Just wait several days after you get cracked and then disable it. By that time they have already posted the cracked key all over the internet and have moved to something else. The only way to stop a hacker is to make him think that he has succeeded. Ivor S. Sargoytchev
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John Cardinal wrote: Probably not, but who knows where the person that did it originally came from. I doubt it was China. Don't be so quick to dismiss China. When Microsoft, IBM, et al look into where most of their pirated software is coming from, China always comes to mind.
Five birds are sitting on a fence. Three of them decide to fly off. How many are left?
Yeah, I guess you never know, it comes down to a cost benefit for a small business like ours: is it worth the time lost in productivity to track these guys down or... I'm thinking of developing an app that software authors can use to automatically search for pirated versions of their software, maybe some good can come out of this. DavidCrow wrote: Five birds are sitting on a fence. Three of them decide to fly off. How many are left? Five?
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John, One piece of advice I want to give you: Have the ability to disable any activation key at any time. This is a golden feature and it will give you great satisfaction using it when someone cracks or leaks an activation key. Also you can fool hackers into thinking that they have broken your key. Just wait several days after you get cracked and then disable it. By that time they have already posted the cracked key all over the internet and have moved to something else. The only way to stop a hacker is to make him think that he has succeeded. Ivor S. Sargoytchev
Ivor S. Sargoytchev wrote: Have the ability to disable any activation key at any time. We do and have done so for some time, but we can't do it any time, the problem is that we can only disable it in a new release, i.e. it's compiled (in encrypted form) in the executable. We posted fresh copies of our software that zapped that license key, but we can't do anything about the people that downloaded before we did that unless they decide to upgrade. If I could find a reliable way to do that automatically without having to post a new executable, and in a way that wouldn't scare people because the software was automatically connecting to the internet etc it would be sweet. Unfortunately I don't think there is any realistic option for doing it automatically that doesn't start to have negative consequences.
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So for anyone who is interested in how a license key gets onto one of those piracy sites I can now speak from experience: On September 11th we get an order for one license of our software. We email the unique license key to the address provided. Last weekend hits to download our software on our website go through the roof, 1000 times more than normal. We backtrack the link and find it's a Chinese site that does nothing but provide license keys, cracked versions of software etc. We find that a link has been placed to our software with the license key and regto name 4 days after it was purchased. We get pissed off, immediately update the download to not work with the keycode in question, problem is that hundreds and hundreds of people have already downloaded and our software is mirrored at tucows which takes forever to update. They continute to download at an astonishing rate, we're over 7GB of bandwidth on Sunday alone. There can't possibly be this many people actually interested in the software, I get the feeling that they are people that would download anything if it's free. We can't simply move the file on our site to break their link, it's linked to by thousands of shareware sites, tucows etc. Our isp tries all day to block anyone coming in with the referrer of this chinese cracker site, ultimately manages to only cause everyone coming to any page on our site to get a permission denied and finally gives up and can't do anything about it. (it's an IIS server, not unix). Mean while, while all this is going on, we contact our lawyers, they start rubbing their hands together, I realize this is going to cost a lot of money so we opt to try to sort it out ourselves. We call the Canadian and U.S. big anti software piracy groups. They basically laugh at us and say give is $5,000.000 to sign up and we'll take a look at it. At this point I'm even more pissed off so I decide it's time to just phone and find out what's going on. I phone the credit card owner, they have no idea what our software is and it turns out have many other charges they didn't authorize. (note, this is a nice older couple, no chance they did this, their credit card info was stolen). I phone the person who we emailed the license key to, he works in another state entirely from the credit card owner, turns out their network was hacked into and our software wasn't the only one that was stolen through thier network and email, they have sinced patched and have kept all the records for any criminal investigation.
With the software protection system I've built into ED (see sig) a license key can only be used for up to two weeks to activate the software. After that the user needs to contact us for a new key. This causes some pain all round, but the benefits are enormous. In essence your problem and many others go away. I have no idea why this isn't common practice. Neville Franks, Author of ED for Windows. Free Trial at www.getsoft.com
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So for anyone who is interested in how a license key gets onto one of those piracy sites I can now speak from experience: On September 11th we get an order for one license of our software. We email the unique license key to the address provided. Last weekend hits to download our software on our website go through the roof, 1000 times more than normal. We backtrack the link and find it's a Chinese site that does nothing but provide license keys, cracked versions of software etc. We find that a link has been placed to our software with the license key and regto name 4 days after it was purchased. We get pissed off, immediately update the download to not work with the keycode in question, problem is that hundreds and hundreds of people have already downloaded and our software is mirrored at tucows which takes forever to update. They continute to download at an astonishing rate, we're over 7GB of bandwidth on Sunday alone. There can't possibly be this many people actually interested in the software, I get the feeling that they are people that would download anything if it's free. We can't simply move the file on our site to break their link, it's linked to by thousands of shareware sites, tucows etc. Our isp tries all day to block anyone coming in with the referrer of this chinese cracker site, ultimately manages to only cause everyone coming to any page on our site to get a permission denied and finally gives up and can't do anything about it. (it's an IIS server, not unix). Mean while, while all this is going on, we contact our lawyers, they start rubbing their hands together, I realize this is going to cost a lot of money so we opt to try to sort it out ourselves. We call the Canadian and U.S. big anti software piracy groups. They basically laugh at us and say give is $5,000.000 to sign up and we'll take a look at it. At this point I'm even more pissed off so I decide it's time to just phone and find out what's going on. I phone the credit card owner, they have no idea what our software is and it turns out have many other charges they didn't authorize. (note, this is a nice older couple, no chance they did this, their credit card info was stolen). I phone the person who we emailed the license key to, he works in another state entirely from the credit card owner, turns out their network was hacked into and our software wasn't the only one that was stolen through thier network and email, they have sinced patched and have kept all the records for any criminal investigation.
John Cardinal wrote: we're out USD$20,000.00+ worth of licenses from the people that downloaded Uhm, you said that the downloads increased 1000-fold after the warez site put the link up on their site. So basically all these people would not have bought your program anyway. While I can feel your pain, the truth of the matter is that you really did not lose any customers who would actually have bought it. Well maybe a few - 5 or 6 people perhaps - who might have legally purchased it might have got distracted by the warez site. I am not justifying them, okay? Dont get me wrong on that point. I think what they did totally sucks! But I am trying to tell you that you did not lose anything financially as you seem to have convinced yourself. had the wzarez site not put up that link with the free serial number, 99.999% of those downloaders wouldnt have even touched your site. As you said, there are people who love downloading something if they feel its a commercial app that they are getting for free. Nish
Extending MFC Applications with the .NET Framework [NW] (coming soon...) Summer Love and Some more Cricket [NW] (My first novel) Shog's review of SLASMC [NW] Come with me if you want to live
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John Cardinal wrote: we're out USD$20,000.00+ worth of licenses from the people that downloaded Uhm, you said that the downloads increased 1000-fold after the warez site put the link up on their site. So basically all these people would not have bought your program anyway. While I can feel your pain, the truth of the matter is that you really did not lose any customers who would actually have bought it. Well maybe a few - 5 or 6 people perhaps - who might have legally purchased it might have got distracted by the warez site. I am not justifying them, okay? Dont get me wrong on that point. I think what they did totally sucks! But I am trying to tell you that you did not lose anything financially as you seem to have convinced yourself. had the wzarez site not put up that link with the free serial number, 99.999% of those downloaders wouldnt have even touched your site. As you said, there are people who love downloading something if they feel its a commercial app that they are getting for free. Nish
Extending MFC Applications with the .NET Framework [NW] (coming soon...) Summer Love and Some more Cricket [NW] (My first novel) Shog's review of SLASMC [NW] Come with me if you want to live
Bandwidth costs money.
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John Cardinal wrote: we're out USD$20,000.00+ worth of licenses from the people that downloaded Uhm, you said that the downloads increased 1000-fold after the warez site put the link up on their site. So basically all these people would not have bought your program anyway. While I can feel your pain, the truth of the matter is that you really did not lose any customers who would actually have bought it. Well maybe a few - 5 or 6 people perhaps - who might have legally purchased it might have got distracted by the warez site. I am not justifying them, okay? Dont get me wrong on that point. I think what they did totally sucks! But I am trying to tell you that you did not lose anything financially as you seem to have convinced yourself. had the wzarez site not put up that link with the free serial number, 99.999% of those downloaders wouldnt have even touched your site. As you said, there are people who love downloading something if they feel its a commercial app that they are getting for free. Nish
Extending MFC Applications with the .NET Framework [NW] (coming soon...) Summer Love and Some more Cricket [NW] (My first novel) Shog's review of SLASMC [NW] Come with me if you want to live
Nishant S wrote: But I am trying to tell you that you did not lose anything financially as you seem to have convinced your Sorry but that's plain wrong, even if you disregard the value of the licenses, here's why: In expenses we're down the price of a license, the price of lost time and productivity of two of our senior staff dealing with this, a few hundred dollars lawyers fees to find out what's involved, lot's of long distance calls all over the U.S., bandwidth charges from our ISP, lost revenue when our site went down while the ISP was trying to block that referrer and real paying customers couldn't get through, delays for downloads of legit people because the file was being hammered so heavily on our site etc. In real expense just to deal with this, completely ignoring the lost sales potential we're probably out a few thousand at least which is big for us.
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So for anyone who is interested in how a license key gets onto one of those piracy sites I can now speak from experience: On September 11th we get an order for one license of our software. We email the unique license key to the address provided. Last weekend hits to download our software on our website go through the roof, 1000 times more than normal. We backtrack the link and find it's a Chinese site that does nothing but provide license keys, cracked versions of software etc. We find that a link has been placed to our software with the license key and regto name 4 days after it was purchased. We get pissed off, immediately update the download to not work with the keycode in question, problem is that hundreds and hundreds of people have already downloaded and our software is mirrored at tucows which takes forever to update. They continute to download at an astonishing rate, we're over 7GB of bandwidth on Sunday alone. There can't possibly be this many people actually interested in the software, I get the feeling that they are people that would download anything if it's free. We can't simply move the file on our site to break their link, it's linked to by thousands of shareware sites, tucows etc. Our isp tries all day to block anyone coming in with the referrer of this chinese cracker site, ultimately manages to only cause everyone coming to any page on our site to get a permission denied and finally gives up and can't do anything about it. (it's an IIS server, not unix). Mean while, while all this is going on, we contact our lawyers, they start rubbing their hands together, I realize this is going to cost a lot of money so we opt to try to sort it out ourselves. We call the Canadian and U.S. big anti software piracy groups. They basically laugh at us and say give is $5,000.000 to sign up and we'll take a look at it. At this point I'm even more pissed off so I decide it's time to just phone and find out what's going on. I phone the credit card owner, they have no idea what our software is and it turns out have many other charges they didn't authorize. (note, this is a nice older couple, no chance they did this, their credit card info was stolen). I phone the person who we emailed the license key to, he works in another state entirely from the credit card owner, turns out their network was hacked into and our software wasn't the only one that was stolen through thier network and email, they have sinced patched and have kept all the records for any criminal investigation.
John, Thanks (well maybe thanks isn't the right word, especially given all the hassle involved) for a really fascinating post. What about setting up a CP contest to come up with the a secure anti-piracy lib that could be used by others? The final test would be to try and attract people to hack it, and the one that lasts longest wins. Perhaps even start a new section, dedicated to copy-protection etc solutions. Surely this is something other people have to deal with as well? ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned
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With the software protection system I've built into ED (see sig) a license key can only be used for up to two weeks to activate the software. After that the user needs to contact us for a new key. This causes some pain all round, but the benefits are enormous. In essence your problem and many others go away. I have no idea why this isn't common practice. Neville Franks, Author of ED for Windows. Free Trial at www.getsoft.com
Excellent idea! Thank you, aside from all the other stuff that we do that would be very beneficial. We currently have a temporary keycode system that we use for purchase orders in case they don't get paid, but we don't use that for credit card purchases, I'm also thinking of making that more widespread as well. (I.E. the initial keycode is a temporary one and we email a replacement when we actually get paid, but it could be extended to any order after a couple of weeks get the final keycode) What we also do and something that I don't know why more people don't do is we don't have anywhere in the program a visible way to enter a keycode. The enter keycode dialog doesn't contain any static text related to keycodes all that text is encrypted in the program and it's a hidden option you can only bring up with a certain set of mouse clicks on a certain screen which the users so far have had no problem with, but it means that you don't know how to enter a keycode unless you get the official registration email which is the only place we publish that information. The person that posted the keycode didn't include those instructions so we've been amused to see replies to their message saying that there is no way to enter the key. It doesn't take a genius to find an alternative way to do it, but it probably stopped a number of people right off the bat.
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John, Thanks (well maybe thanks isn't the right word, especially given all the hassle involved) for a really fascinating post. What about setting up a CP contest to come up with the a secure anti-piracy lib that could be used by others? The final test would be to try and attract people to hack it, and the one that lasts longest wins. Perhaps even start a new section, dedicated to copy-protection etc solutions. Surely this is something other people have to deal with as well? ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned
I agree but it would have to be a system that doesn't work through obscurity for obvious reasons. I'd love to see all the ideas for a system that works even though the method is plainly obvious and documented. There is a *lot* of good info on other techniques and about the problem in general here: http://inner-smile.com/nocrack.phtml[^] But as the title says those methods just make it harder, not impossible.
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So for anyone who is interested in how a license key gets onto one of those piracy sites I can now speak from experience: On September 11th we get an order for one license of our software. We email the unique license key to the address provided. Last weekend hits to download our software on our website go through the roof, 1000 times more than normal. We backtrack the link and find it's a Chinese site that does nothing but provide license keys, cracked versions of software etc. We find that a link has been placed to our software with the license key and regto name 4 days after it was purchased. We get pissed off, immediately update the download to not work with the keycode in question, problem is that hundreds and hundreds of people have already downloaded and our software is mirrored at tucows which takes forever to update. They continute to download at an astonishing rate, we're over 7GB of bandwidth on Sunday alone. There can't possibly be this many people actually interested in the software, I get the feeling that they are people that would download anything if it's free. We can't simply move the file on our site to break their link, it's linked to by thousands of shareware sites, tucows etc. Our isp tries all day to block anyone coming in with the referrer of this chinese cracker site, ultimately manages to only cause everyone coming to any page on our site to get a permission denied and finally gives up and can't do anything about it. (it's an IIS server, not unix). Mean while, while all this is going on, we contact our lawyers, they start rubbing their hands together, I realize this is going to cost a lot of money so we opt to try to sort it out ourselves. We call the Canadian and U.S. big anti software piracy groups. They basically laugh at us and say give is $5,000.000 to sign up and we'll take a look at it. At this point I'm even more pissed off so I decide it's time to just phone and find out what's going on. I phone the credit card owner, they have no idea what our software is and it turns out have many other charges they didn't authorize. (note, this is a nice older couple, no chance they did this, their credit card info was stolen). I phone the person who we emailed the license key to, he works in another state entirely from the credit card owner, turns out their network was hacked into and our software wasn't the only one that was stolen through thier network and email, they have sinced patched and have kept all the records for any criminal investigation.
It happened to me recently, I am sure none of the people who downloaded would have bought it anyway and most probably won't use it. Just increases my bandwidth and I have to spend time trying to stop them accessing my site! Actually there is a freeware version of this software on my site, which for 99.9% of people is more than adequate!
Hell, there are no rules here-- we're trying to accomplish something. - Thomas A. Edison
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Ivor S. Sargoytchev wrote: Have the ability to disable any activation key at any time. We do and have done so for some time, but we can't do it any time, the problem is that we can only disable it in a new release, i.e. it's compiled (in encrypted form) in the executable. We posted fresh copies of our software that zapped that license key, but we can't do anything about the people that downloaded before we did that unless they decide to upgrade. If I could find a reliable way to do that automatically without having to post a new executable, and in a way that wouldn't scare people because the software was automatically connecting to the internet etc it would be sweet. Unfortunately I don't think there is any realistic option for doing it automatically that doesn't start to have negative consequences.
What about something that discretely "checks online for updates," and while it's "checking" it also checks to make sure that the activation key is still valid? That way, even if you have a very sophisticated user who can sniff the packets and, somehow, figure out that you are sending data back to a server, you can say it's all part of the update process...plus, if there is an update you can tell them so (maybe even prompt to pay for additional upgrades). D Daniel Larsen, Professional Casanova Blood, Sweat, Toil and Tears