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Comment by Tyrant505 | Hacker News Reader

What exactly is HARD to pirate? edit: More specifically, Crack. I remember x-force having sources in all the major places ready to dump it to their cracker division.

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Skype for a very long time had some absurd protection against things like attaching debuggers, adding code, and whatnot (as I recall). There was a great presentation about it, but I cannot for the life of me find it.

Ok, but not exactly the type of standalone software we are speaking upon, yes? edit: as an aside, adobe's subscription based model could be seen as a way to curtail.

To my very limited knowledge, the most difficult software to crack was Steinberg Cubase. Such a PITA the hackers decided not to do it ever again. They quoted a ridiculously large figure for the amount code devoted to detect cracking (~30%), and having a significant impact on performance.

I had links about about bypassing anti-debugging techniques, I'll see if I can get my hands on them again.

Cubase was, by far, the hardest program to find a crack for. I remember a buddy of mine hooked me up with a cracked version that actually worked, but then I reinstalled and lost the files. Never found it again and stopped using Cubase. A year later I just purchased Ableton Live. I know so many people that use Live now because Cubase was too difficult to crack.

The current version of Live on the Macintosh itself took quite some time to crack.

Those guys at Ableton are serious business.

It's at http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-...

Many DAW's (Digital Audio Workstation) such as Cubase, and DSP "plug-ins" have special software protection schemes. Cubase uses something called eLicenser[1].

Another popular, niche product that has proven difficult to fully crack is a program called Pro Tools, created by DigiDesign, now owned by Avid. It uses a protection called PACE Anti-Piracy[2]. Many expensive pieces of software require unique hardware, either a security dongle or some other external device.

[1] eLicenser.net

[2] paceap.com

Things that use codemeter are impossible (At least right now).

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