“OK, I add content but what about my competition adding content?”

The simple truth is, and this is probably more applicable to smaller niche markets (vertical) than to broader horizontal markets, is that most of your competition will never do it.

By and large most of us compete with people who are either 100% programmers or 100% hobbyists.  Generally speaking neither is terribly good at writing content, neither is terribly interested in trying and neither bothers to consider why they should.

It’s about what motivates their/our thought processes.  Most dev’s and hobbyists have the perspective that  “if I build it they will come.”

That they won’t and don’t never seems to enter their heads.  As you’re reading this I’m assuming it’s entered your head.  The fact that you read blogs, whether you agree with me or not, or anybody else you read, sets you apart from the rest and it’s probable – apart from your own competition.

Newsflash: The idea of content on the net for marketing purposes is not new.

It’s been with us since the mid/late nineties at least.  But very few developers have actually done anything about it.  That’s because most look for automated solutions.  They firmly believe the “easiest way” is always the best way – it’s a developer thing.  It’s what makes us tick.  We automate to solve others problems and look for automation to solve our own.

While I personally advocate giving the download sites in general a miss, with the exceptions of CNet, Tucows and a handful of others, I don’t for a moment expect wide spread agreement with me on this particular blasphemy amongst developers… 

But – even if you do decide download sites and submission software is important to you, and I acknowledge there are arguments in favor of this – I just dispute them – your job is far from over.

Your competition is going to be using PAD files, download sites and possibly automated submission.  There is no silver bullet here.  Your use of these tools is not unique, it does not set you apart and it does not do much more than scrape the surface for the possible combinations of search terms people are going to type into a search engine.

You’re goal is to gain as many clicks from as many of those search terms as you can – at least for the important ones.  Your product name and the solution it addresses may not always be the important one a potential customer is looking for.

Google Adwords gets a lot of text written about it.  From genuine marketing gurus to the insidious wanker’s looking to scam by producing “Secrets of Google Adwords Revealed” type claptrap.

It’s a great tool, Adwords, I’m not about to argue otherwise.  The statistics are against trying to claim anything other than use Adwords as far as you can afford to do so.

But – the very keywords ISV’s pain over for their products – and it has to be said – at times pay through the nose for – in many instances can be obtained free just by using content for the search engines.  Google, and to a lesser extent some of the other engines, seem to place a site as authorative based on content.

If your site details and provides content related to the keywords you need, logically, you’re going to be more authorative.

According to Google presently, at least from the engine here in Oz, this blog is the most authorative in relation to the keywords “Starting an mISV” and sixth most authorative for “Starting an ISV”.  Some guys called Eric Sink, Joel and Ian are in front of me on the latter- whoever they are… 

Google Have Improved Search And It Works In Our Favor…

I personally admire the way Google works.  Despite the many criticisms of Google they have improved the quality of search.  Going back to the days of 90′s search engine spamtopia is evidence of that.

We can use this to our advantage, legitimately, properly and cleanly.  You will not read anything here – ever - suggesting you try to game the search engines.  I view such tactics along the same lines as I view download sites.  Bottom feeding parasites intent on offering no value to others but value to themselves using any scam way possible.

Don’t try to scam or game the engines.  Instead be a contributor of value, not a purveyor of SEO perversity – and hold your head high.

Be wary of Gurus Sprouting Yesterday’s Wisdom…

As I’ve said here before, what used to be true does not always hold.  The “wisdom” of download site submission as the most effective tool for search engine clicks is flawed.  It’s flawed because the download sites increasingly offer little or no value to their visitors and increasingly push them to click on Adsense sprayed all over the “page” dedicated to your product – almost in an overwhelming number of cases burying it.  Frequently removing direct links to you and if the link is there using redirects and no follow tags.

With content you not only provide relevant value but you reach beyond the meager PAD file descriptions that these sites invariably repeat.  A thousand submissions all to often equals a thousand PAD description duplications.  There is no value in this.

But content you write that relates to your product – information people are looking to find out – is unique.  It’s your’s and prepared properly (practice) it lasts and ties in well with your objectives of leading your potential customers to a place where they can more easily access your product.

Altruistically speaking you’re potentially helping them twice.  To my mind that’s a powerful concept.

The cost is your time.  If you can afford not to expend your time on writing your own content and can afford to pay somebody to write it – more power to you.  But don’t shrug it off with the usual old developer BS of “I have better things to do than write stuff like content – I’m a programmer not a bloody writer.” Because if you do you are wrong on both counts…

You are first and foremost a business person.  Programmers work for “other” people.  Writers work generally for “other people” – but business people – ISV’s – work for themselves and do things that provide benefit to their businesses.

Watch the doughnut, not the hole…

Watching the download sites and not the hole seems to be a developer trait we need to shed.  I’ve seen so much text typed over and over again about “what’s the best tool for maximum download sites submission” and “which are the best download sites” and then little sprinkles of reality like “very few of my clicks come from download sites…”

Hang on….  That last one.  “…very few clicks”  ??

What’s going on here?

The prevailing logic is that the links on the download sites (which invariably do not point directly to you or are redirected or have no follow links) feed back into the SEO loop.  The more the better right?

Vitamin C helps us avoid getting colds so I’ll swallow the whole bottle I’ll never get a cold - ever!!

Ya think?

I know I’m belaboring this point.  But honestly, it’s illogical to think that thousands or even hundreds of submissions is going to offer long term assistance.  Google and the others, over time and increasingly as algorithms are tweaked are going to strip this repetitive PAD induced vomit out of their listings leaving you back at square one.  It’s happening now and it’s going to become increasingly common because Google has never made any secret of the fact that they strive to optmize quality search and remove garbage and duplication.

I’m going to put my money where my mouth is though, because I know that no matter how many paragraphs I write here a good many of readers aren’t going to buy into the idea that content is superior to download site submissions as an SEO tool.  I might be arrogant but I’m not that dumb!! 

MixAction, my own product, will be released sometime this year.  Hopefully sooner than later.  Here’s what I’m going to do.  I’m going to run a commentary here on what I’m doing and then map that back to SEO results as they happen.  Real results and not just some guy on a blog poking holes in the air with his fingers…

I’m also going to review a great little book (e-book) that’s very affordable, cuts to the chase and I believe will help set some ISV’s in the right direction.  It’s written by fellow blogger and ISV Steph.  Stay tuned!

Have a great day!

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
Eat a live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day. – Unknown

Related posts

• Starting An ISV? No Domain Knowledge? Go To Incubator, do not pass Go, do not collect a Registration… (1)
• 10 Years Anniversary Today. EPIC FAIL. I Quit. Starting An ISV … (7)
• Day 52 – Downloadsiteasaurus – Extinction Event (8)
• Another nail in the coffin (0)
• Some ISV Marketing Freebies (0)

I’ve blogged here before about MultMediaSoft and their stunning developer tools.  MixAction uses them and because I’ve been so delighted I purchased the entire audio suite, the whole shebang and not just part as I had previously.  An absolute bargain.  It’s a pleasure working with Severino with support issues, instant response and almost (within one hour) instant solutions.  The audio library is an absolute joy to work work with and it allows me to expand for the future into areas more quickly and easily with MixAction and associated products than I’d originally envisaged.  I mention this as an indication that MixAction is still being heavily re-developed, in spite of some hiccups this week with bad power supply (ongoing brown outs at my wife’s place destroying three computers this year there, even with a filter) and an adventure here with a very dead, 6 month old Microsoft mouse that I had to replace as my other mice are cable mice and the darn cables don’t reach on the development machine to my desk.  So another $100 + on a new Microsoft keyboard/mouse combo which is – er  – “comfortable” I guess even if the pricing is ludicrous.

OK.  Today I thought I’d do a quick piece on an issue I’ve spoken to a few people on, that I feel is significant to mISV’s.  Namely those archaic, pre-dot com bust relics of the bulletin board era, that I now firmly believe to be deleterious to an mISV’s business.

These website’s, that swallow voluminous quantities of PAD files daily expelling them onto pages like some kind of digital dysentery, surrounded by pustules of Google  Adsense, have become so common it would be fair to label them a web-pandemic.

In order to get a handle on these blights, that pockmark the search engine landscape like serial acne, one has to consider a little bit of history of where they came from.  How they began, as is so often the case, as a good thing and then devolved into a malicious out of control monster.

So let’s dig a little for a moment, into the strata of software downloads history.

When I began in this industry, or at least, first started participating in it, there weren’t any download sites, no publicly available “Internet”  and, scary as it may seem, no Bulletin Boards – at least in this country – that one could log onto and get the latest and greatest.  You exchanged floppy disks.  Actually, that’s not true.  You exchanged cassette tapes because my (and everybody I knew who had one) “home” computer accepted that as a storage medium.

Things changed and in the early to mid eighties,  while I typed in decimal into a terminal and got hex out the other end on tape (unless I was forced to work on software for an even older machine that spat out oct) by day I could go home and dial in on a modem and save all kinds of goodies to my – er – floppy disks.

The era of the bulletin board had come to Oz.  Later came the “shareware” revolution that brought such cool things as PKZip (Yay!!  We could finally get rid of Arc and LHA and AlHarc and all the others).  This was the only method a software developer could distribute software if you couldn’t finance retail distribution (which meant most of us).  You basically uploaded your latest and greatest software to your local friendly BBS and through a network of services like Fido and others your release actually could go world wide.  One of my favorites was Algorithms Anonymous run by my good friend Glenn Crouch in Kalgoorlie Australia.

In the early to mid-nineties the Internet era dawned and the humble BBS began to decline (in some ways I still miss them, they tended to attract folks who were a little friendlier than the Internet is today).

With the development of the “Web” (and if you’re reading this and thinking Web = Internet please do some research) the download sites appeared.  Download.com, Winsite, Tucows, even the renegade NoNags (a rather two faced download site that prohibits software asking for payment (nags) but who has no problem asking the visitor continuously to “register” for unfettered access), to name a few.

There were of course a lot of smaller sites who were run by enthusiasts who gave a damn about software (often programmers themselves)  and who offered value to the web surfers experience on the net and greatly aided us all in the distribution of our software to the public (a more technical and specialized public than the general public who now also access the Internet (and to whom most malware is squarely aimed).

Many of these sites, big and small, used banner adds to defray the costs of running the site, and hopefully a bit on top as profit.  Remember this was pre-dot com bust.  Google’s founders hadn’t begun Google yet, the search engine landscape being dominated by players that many folks haven’t heard of , but were big in their time.

The only real survivor of this era search engine wise now is Yahoo.  Since we’re using paleontology as a metaphor in this article, if download sites are Jurassic then the likes of Yahoo could be classified as being relics from the Pleistocene of the digital era.  Any similarity to Yahoo and a Neandertal are purely coincidental.

Anyway, these download sites served a valuable function to both the developer (distribution) and the consumer (access).

To facilitate the process a file was distributed with every download of a program (almost) called FileID.diz.  This was a descriptive file that the download site could use for information about the software product and to a lesser extent the consumer could get a summary after downloading (most downloads were still in archives, such a zip files,  installers and especially exe installers were as rare as chicken teeth).

Towards the end of the nineties a developer friend of mine, Harold Holmes, along with several other folks in the ASP discussed and then Harold created the PAD file (Portable Application Description), an XML file that could be parsed by a download site to provide a full description of the product, with a choice of parameters almost automagically.

I still have the official mouse mat that went with the release. 

A great idea.  A truly great innovation.  An elegant solution to a problem and worthy of great respect.

That’s when PADKIT was born.  This monster was inadvertently spewed from the ASP as a tool to assist in the automation of PAD file incorporation by download sites.  The idea was a good one, but little did they know (or could know) that it would end up being used for the purposes of SEO spamming.

Once Google had become a predominant force in the SEO wars after the dot com bust the door was open.  Previously to get folks to advertise on your website you had to get results.  To get results you needed a reputation.  A bit of a chicken and egg problem.  Google removed this with one fowl (misspelling intentional) swoop.

Adsense.

It’s not that Adsense in itself was evil, or that Google was evil, or is, but rather that the world is composed of some folks who are intrinsically and pathologically evil and Adsense + PADKIT + PAD meant “BHHHhhhhahhahahhahaa!” in voices that make the witches from Macbeth sound like ladies you’d invite home to meet mother.

It’s bad enough most of these cruddy sites surround a listing with Adsense adds that all to frequently advertise your competitor or a link to some pimply faced Jolly Roger’s site advertising a crack or keygen, but they then started burying the download link in tiny text literally compelling the visitor to click an add.

The next phase was to require you to click the download link and be taken to another page full of more Adsense and another download link in type size that would make a great home for an amoeba, but wouldn’t fit much else.

That the likes of Softpedia, the ultimate spinners of bovine excrement in relation to scanning for spyware, who founded themselves on PAD files would then move to ripping content not from the PAD file but directly from the software developers website was the first indication I saw of where things had arrived.

OK.  We did have (and have) the cases of PAD spoofing.  Basically the process of some crook posting a PAD file purporting to be from a real software developer with real products (in other words replacing legitimate entries on a download site with a link to a malware payload) which led to the ASP pursuing digital signing of PAD files.  A concept that is a great idea, but not overtly successful at this point, nor to I expect it to become so.

Andy Bryce did some great work exposing and defining the nature of these download sites with his Software Award Scam.  Click the link to Andy’s site if you’ve not read it, then drop back here.

Right.  Read it?  Got it?  Scam.  Worth less than the electrons used to generate the “awards”.  If you’re displaying this garbage on your website then GET RID OF THEM!  Don’t participate in this fraud, it just encourages these sites and for some folks lends them credibility.

Alright.  Given the last four paragraphs above.  These sites, Softpedia (who remember had no problems stealing content to do so) and others fill pages 1 to 50 (and beyond) of Google for just about any downloadable software product available on the net today.  For a canny software developer this isn’t a big problem.  Getting to the top is possible.  For newcomers it’s almost futile.  It’s not a level playing field.  Stealing content, being good Google customers (lots of Adsense remember?) and sheer numbers of the darn things means they frequently outrank the actual software developer and genuine reviews of software by journalists and consumers.

Remember, if they rip your content from your website or steal your search terms and other tricks Google is likely to punish you, especially if you’re new, for duplicating content.  These download sites become “authorative”.  You are assumed to be SPAM.

Hardly good SEO sense for the software developer, is it?

I blogged here some time back about downloading early this year bucket loads of files from download sites, many well known ones and some mentioned above.  Download.com, Tucows and their likes were as clean as a whistle.

But most of the others had malware.  Not every download, not even most downloads, but some downloads.  Belying their banners proclaiming scanned and “spyware” or “malware” free.

Why do they do it?  I don’t think they place the nefarious files there themselves.  That’s the work of others, unconnected.  In some cases it’s PAD file hijacking.  BUT – these download sites simply don’t care.  They don’t even remove the offending links.

Apart from the Adsense income to boost the ranking of other sites it’s about “Blackhat SEO”.  The process of creating a website specifically to benefit another site.  In fact they BRAG about doing it.  They have no interest in the software, the developer or the consumer.  Indeed all indications are that all they have is utter contempt.

In conclusion, for now at least, I for my part will have nothing to do with the download sites with the exception of download.com, Tucows a few others carefully picked by me.

Google will wake up to them.  But it will take time.  Probably within the next twelve months to three years IMHO.  At that point they’ll be dropped from the engine.  Many of them are going to be labeled for containing malware.  Google has begun doing this, Yahoo has joined up with Useless Incorporated (otherwise known as McAfee SiteAdvisor) – see my post here on this – and I certainly don’t want to be caught in the fallout, which I believe must occur, when they do.  Do you?

MixAction will be released with a license prohibiting download sites carrying it with implicit written instructions for those sites that may do so.  For sites in the Western world I intend to enforce that license.  For those elsewhere who can cringe from such things impervious (for now) to Berne and other restrictions, I’m working on something a little different.

Conclusion?  Download sites = Extinction Event.  A Google driven comet impact coming their way.

It’s way past my bedtime, I’ve written enough for this article.  I’ll look at following it up in the future if folks are interested.

I know a lot of folks are not going to agree with me here.  I guess it’s one of those inconveniant posts one would prefer not to read.  All I ask is that you consider it.  Think about it.  Do some snooping of your own.  It’s not hard.  Then come to your own conclusions.

For those who think the SEO advantages outweigh the disadvantages I’ve talked about, consider that the software industry is the only industry that has these kind of leeches hanging of it on the web.  Nothing comes close nor has the same impact.  Even the music download industry has to fight it’s way to the top of the listings unaided – and they manage to do it…

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
The squeaking wheel doesn’t always get the grease. Sometimes it gets replaced. – Vic Gold

Related posts

• Starting An ISV? No Domain Knowledge? Go To Incubator, do not pass Go, do not collect a Registration… (1)
• Content – OK, But What About The ISV Competition And Their Content? (2)
• Cracks, Hacks, Keygens, Torrent Files and Lamers (2)
• Micro ISV Book Review – How To Generate Traffic For Your Website (5)
• Another nail in the coffin (0)

Originally I intended to make this blog something that the ISV and mISV could use to reference in relation to some of the issues faced with piracy of 2008 and potentially beyond.  I’ve simply not had the time I hoped for to compile several years of research on this into articles on a consistent basis – or any basis.  My own decision to launch a mISV and grow it applying some of the things I’ve learnt from a few folks on the BOS forums and in the past from my previous “life” in software development and marketing that took a different and I believe now to be frequently outmoded method of delivery, intent, design and more importantly *mindset*.  I would never have believed, even six month ago, how fundamentally life changing this shift in mindset actually is nor how limiting following the older tenets actually were.

But I digress.

This is to be the first article and I hope not the last, no guarantees there though as I am genuinely flat out coding and would much prefer to look at the more positive business issues in this blog rather than this rather distasteful subject.  However some folks might get some value out of the articles and if they do that’s great, if they don’t know harm done.

I do need to make it clear that there will be *nothing* mind shatteringly new here in regards to the topic of piracy.  Rather it’s a summation, not a complete treatise, on some of the issues for ISV”s to consider and this first article is just an introduction to terms purely as a “know thy enemy”.

OK.  Preliminaries out of the way.

Some definitions are in order of the kind of people and things/services we will discuss as I throw these articles together.  For the purposes of these articles I will be defining the following as:

1. Hacker: Technically the name for a programmer, misapplied by the clueless media and the clueless masses who believe anything a journalist tells them as given.  I will not use the word “Hacker” to describe a person engaged in piracy in any form or somebody who uses their skills to cause willful damage.  Such people are:

2. Crackers: Otherwise very intelligent people, sometimes programmers who are motivated by a variety of reasons to crack security of systems, software and data or a combination of these.  It’s a grave pity that their intellect could not be applied to software development, systems design etc, though in some cases it actually is.  Lots of grey areas in all these definitions BTW.

Most genuine Crackers do not publish their methods widely for general consumption.  They tend to be elite and remain that way.  However there are those who do publish their results for general consumption or make it possible to follow their techniques by publishing their methods.  This is done for altruistic though I believe misguided reasons frequently, but there it is.

Some of them despise open piracy and you will find forums (public and private) where they vent their feelings.  Some on the other hand actually support piracy, often with the “stick it to the man” mentality that is akin to the kind of otherwise intelligent people who fall for Leninism, Fascism, Maoism and other dysfunctional agendas.  Most of the serious cracking of software is initially done by these folks and it is in the context of software cracking that we are concerned with here.  It’s from these guys we get the hard to beat cracks and of course the ubiquitous Keygen.

3. Script Kiddies: Technically folks who crack software aren’t referred to as Script Kiddies however those who do most of the scene cracking where kudos are given to the highest cracked software turnover (day, week, month etc) are probably best described as such as they use scripts/Tutorials or “Tut’s” as they prefer to call them (literacy is not a priority of these losers) to achieve their goal.  Personally I prefer the term Wanker for these guys, but if I use Wanker for them nobody is really going to know what I’m referring to. Scumbags, Scrubbers, Petty Thieves, Bogans are also terms that apply.  To say they are clueless and lame (incredible insults in their community) is probably an understatement.  Most of them couldn’t program a simple batch file let alone a simple text editor in assembly, never mind a fully functional GUI that anybody wanted.  These are the folks who will use a Tut to learn how to unpack an executable protector (insert name of your favorite protector) and think they are real “cool dudes” and “mean hackers”.   Total wankers of course but none the less dangerous to an ISV’s business.

4. Organized Crime: There are many net orientated organized crime gangs.  One of the best known and most widely publicized is the infamous RBN (Russian Business Network).  Allegedly the head or heads have a family tie to a Russian politician who it is alleged makes them tough nuts to crack – no pun intended.   According to what is known they disappeared off the radar last November 2007, popped up in China, did a bit of damage for late December and early January and then disappeared again.  A lot of security pundits have declared this a huge victory over the RBN.  I would argue the security pundits claiming this as a victory have a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock or somehow believe that by claiming it they will achieve a clandestine advantage of their own.  Be that as it may.  Organized crime is involved in the software hacking and cracking scene and not, as many tend to suggest, so they can sell it illegally.  Sure this happens but the real value seems to really be in getting bots and Trojans into Joe and Jill Six-pack’s machine.   The number of cracks and Keygens containing Trojans and Bots is phenomenal.  After downloading thousands of these (in a dedicated old clunker machine, no way I’d even visit these websites on a good machine) for examination I found only 100 that contained no payload.  I did not test them against the software they were supposed to work against so I have no idea if the payload is transferred or not.  Scanning them with various anti-virus programs was also an eye opener as most of the big boy AV packages simply didn’t pick them or if they did failed to render them harmless.  These Bots and Trojans delivered, in many instances, correspond or are similar to those delivered by alledged organized crime gangs.  Whether this is a direct result of their influence or not is not clear – which is pretty much the case for most of these kind of things.

5. Torrent Sites: The technology of the torrent is a wonderful thing that has many great *legal* uses.  Sadly scum and petty thieves have adopted the technology all most as if it was there own.  Enter sites, for which I refuse to help increase their Alexa ranking or Google ranking any further for by using their real name here, such as the PatheticCriminalBay in Sweden and other places make popular destinations and relative safe havens for Joe and Jill Six-pack to download software like byte addicted kleptomaniacs.  These places are next to impossible to shut down because they have weak governing systems (hello Sweden!) in relation to enforcement of copyright law and convention (even when signed up to Berne as the likes of Sweden are).  Sending cease and desist and DMCA violation notices is laughed at and publicly used to taunt inept lawyers who really don’t get it.  Only political and economic muscle can fix this, or massive DOS attacks on the offenders.  I do not support the latter option as it’s not effective.  Political and economic muscle will fix it in countries such as Sweden but the risk is incredible.  The Euro, for example, has a lot to loose from any action taken by the USA, UK, Canada, Australia etc if such action is taken in unison and it is sad, to me, that so many innocent people could get financially hurt because of such action.  Are our politicians thinking about this option?  I am.  I have no idea how many software developers become directly and actively politically involved, but this one is and it is on my own agenda and it’s something I’ve discussed with politicians with more influence than I have and who were interested in the concept (and the losses the industry faces now and into the future).

6. Download Sites: No.  I’m not suggesting for a moment the download sites are necessarily assisting directly in piracy.  There may be a few who do it inadvertently through Google adds and such on their sites but I’m yet to confirm a single one who is actually doing it on purpose.  That is not to say there are none or none with connections.  But I have no proof of that, if you do contact me, I’d be happy to investigate in the strictest confidence.

HOWEVER.   I did use the word inadvertently and I will expand on that.  When they claim they have scanned for viruses and Trojans they are invariably telling pork pies.  I have *never* found anything wrong malware wise from a file on say Download.Com/C-Net or Tucows who I know do scan.  But I have on an incredible number of others.  BOTS, Trojans etc.  Some of it linking supposedly to legitimate software but through various techniques bypassing the real developer of the software and their real package and delivering their own nasty one.  Contact one of these download sites and don’t hold your breath for a reply.  They don’t care.  They run them for the Google add income and/or Black Hat SEO potential such sites currently bring.  Look towards Google addressing this sometime in the next few years.  Still think the SEO advantages of a download site outway the concerns you should have in relation to our responsibility to consumers and of course our own businesses?

7. Crack: Usually a piece of software (program) that patches an executable by changing original values to something else.  For example bit flipping or returning a desired result from a Boolean (like the classic IsItRegistered routines so many programmers unwittingly use).  Telling a real crack from malware is virtually impossible for most people.  Complicated further when it can be both at once and/or uses “secrets” known only to insiders in the cracking “scene”.  This hidden payload method is a favorite on peer to peer networks like Limewire and similar.

8. Keygens: A program written to generate a working serial number for a piece of software.  More deadly than a crack a Keygen can really eat into profits when released and depending on the technology you employ (see here for information on PKV) very hard to counter-attack.

9. Serialz: Corruption of the word “Serial” as in “Serial Number”.  A working serial number for a program.  Very popular Google search term.  Sometimes gained via a Keygen, commonly gained by purchasing a valid license by using a stolen credit card number and “released” via crack sites and torrent sites.  Probably the lamest and most identifiably illegal method used to most people, employed by many who fall into the script kiddy and scene cracking area.  Lamest of the lame in essence.  This hurts more than the software company from who the serial is illegally purchased from.  It doesn’t hurt the credit card companies – they charge the software company via a charge-back that includes a fee.  It hurts the consumer who owned the credit card as well and adds to the cost of online security.  Often users of this technique (in keeping with lame excuses used by criminals since time began) will blame the software company for making their software so darned hard to crack.  Keep this lame justification in mind when you are trying to use or employ commercial “uncrackable” software protection (if there even was such a thing) or just in making it really hard.

10. Casual Piracy: Believe it or not this remains, since the early days of software, one of the biggest piracy issues where-by the consumer hands their license key to Mary, who gives it to Joe or hands it to John or has ten friends who…    This is a tough one to beat.  I’ll talk more about this in another article, not that I have any solutions to it mind as I don’t believe there is a one size fits all solution to any of these.

In conclusion for this article.

What does all this mean to the consumer?  Basically use cracks or Keygens and you are pretty much guaranteeing yourself grief or handing your computers processing power over to an organized crime gang for use in other activities when you don’t even know they are doing it, even if you have anti-virus and a firewall!  It’s been estimated that the RBN could, if they chose, shut down a massive chunk of network or even a country in terms of computing infrastructure if they chose.  Reports that they’ve been selling access to their bots make one wonder just how clued most of our politicians are when it comes to security, domestic and international, crime and of course terrorism.

In the next article on this particular topic I’ll be looking at protection of executables more superficially and in a sense what it is we do wrong and how there is basically no bloody way, with current methods available, for us to fix it.   Sounds cheery huh? 

Related posts

• Starting An ISV? No Domain Knowledge? Go To Incubator, do not pass Go, do not collect a Registration… (1)
• Day 52 – Downloadsiteasaurus – Extinction Event (8)
• The Politics Of Software Pricing Models, FOS, FUD And Economic Pragmatism. (5)
• Content – OK, But What About The ISV Competition And Their Content? (2)
• CDROO Launched – A Micro ISV Resource For Royalty Free Music And Sound + An Offer To Readers (2)