|
Shortly after a big upgrade to the application I worked on, we started to get bug reports on our forum about a pretty ugly bug where a modal window would get “stuck” after clicking OK. The window would no longer respond to users but the application would act as if it were still up, and the only way out was to kill the process and lose all the unsaved work. Understandably, the complaints got louder and angrier as no one on our engineering or prerelease teams were able to reproduce it, but easily half the bug reports were all about this issue and identical. After 2 weeks of trying every configuration of video card, OS, and any other alchemical recipe we could think of, my partner on the test team stumbled upon the license crack online while searching for anyone else having this problem but not having reported it to us directly. As a brief respite from this ongoing madness, he decided to install the crack on a clean machine and aee how it worked so we could report it. Lo and behold, the problem reproduced on the first try. This whole time, indignant, angry users who were actively threatening our team and vowing to never use another product from our company had been bested by a poorly written crack. Before exposing the secret, I asked dozens of the most vocal and vicious reporters to please email me a particular log file, and give me contact information where we might get in touch with them as we were close to cracking the case. (Pun intended, and this was before we had very clear rules around personally identifiable information, but even with the policy at the time, these weren’t our customers so I felt less anguish about it.). I received all of it and more, invited them to share their experiences on the forum threads, and then tactfully but clearly explained exactly why they’d seen this problem. I offered to work one on one with anyone who felt my accusation was in error, but not one single affected user replied or followed up after that message. |
This was before validating license keys over the internet was really possible so a lot of people just used our application with a key from a public cracking site. Of course, we also knew about this list of cracked keys and our application would pretend to accept them. But if you actually tried to use the application, it would appear to be doing something for several minutes but fail with a mysterious error inviting the user to submit a log file to support.
Of course, the log file was secretly marked to indicate that it had come from a pirated copy and the customer would get a polite call from the sales team.
It worked out pretty well, a lot of customers didn't know they were using pirated software (or so they claimed; somewhat plausible given the nature of the utility) and were happy to pay and the sales team got a lot of solid leads. Evil vanquished, good prevailed, and I got paid.