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Comment by shadowOfShadow | Hacker News Reader

That entitled attitude of the complainer is so familiar. Hate that shit.

He writes software to demonstrate security flaws to a fairly niche market. I'd say his actions are justified - he's just showing that it isn't safe at all to download a cracked version of a pentesting software package.

shadowOfShadow's wording is a little unclear, but I suspect he was talking about the email exchange with a non customer complaining about lack of support.

I read shadowOfShadow's comment the same way you do. (for others reading this): in the comments section, I reproduce an exchange (anonymized, of course) I had with someone complaining about my support--when they were trying to install a cracked version of my software. This exchange is what led to the blog post linked here.

That user appears to claim he has a valid license to your software (third e-mail). Is that wrong?

He only has the license for a trial version.

@valleyer: He "signed up" for a trial and emailed me for help. But, when he asked for help, he provided the tar command he typed and the output of the tar command.

He changed the tar command he typed to make it look like he was trying to install my trial.

The output of tar told a different story though. The cracked trial was distributed as a .tgz with a space in it. Because this guy didn't know to put quotes around the filename, tar gave him an error he didn't know how to interpret.

He left the output untouched, and I was able to determine the name of the file he was trying to extract, google it, and strongly conclude he was asking for support for a cracked version of my software.

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