Normally, how fast does an unfinished program spread?

[ki4jgt]

For everyone who is into the whole Terminator scene, Skynet appears to now be happening. Somehow a program I wrote a few months back needs serial cracking. (I never put in a requirement for a serial/registration number - It falls under the GPL and I didn't see a need to force people to buy it when they could just compile it for free) I did a quick search on duckduckgo and there are tons of sites offering cracking for my program‽ What's even weirder is the amount of sites which are offering to allow users to download it. I haven't worked on it forever and the bugs aren't all worked out yet. Why would anyone want it?

[GregBrannon]

There is often no data to determine normalcy for every possible event. There is no meaningful answer to this question. I suspect unfinished programs released into the wild will spread nearly as fast as finished ones. There's an appetite for most anything, even the most inane, broken, useless thing.

[ki4jgt]

IDK, I guess it's just really weird. I haven't finished my program yet and there are already dozens of site which know about it. Something else I've noticed, what's up with all the archiving sites? As if everything you said wasn't for some reason already indexed in Google, it has to be archived in sites which have nothing to do with what you're talking about what so ever???

[Kirboosy]

Whats the name of the program?


Did you have it published or managed on any sort of GIT, SVN or BZR? If you had it on the internet in anyway it would easily be ripped off if its a good idea.

[ssam]

is the thing that these sites offer actually your program? is it your program plus some malware? are they just trying to get more visitors to their site to view ads?

[wmcbrine]

Are you sure the cracks aren't for a different program with the same name?

[ki4jgt]

Are you sure the cracks aren't for a different program with the same name?

Doubt it. They even have the versioning information attached. Since I've only had one release, I assume it's mine.

[rg4w]

Crackers will post anything. It's weird, almost like some sort of hoarding mentality.

One of the apps I make for my clients is almost entirely uninteresting except to sociologists doing qualitative data analysis; very vertical market, not at all visually exciting. Yet just as so many of the app security sites suggest, whenever we post a new version a cracked edition appears on foreign servers within a few days, even though the app is of zero utility to 99.99% of the people getting it from those sites.

With another app I publish I regularly see keygens offered around the web, but the ones I've seen thus far are just Trojan horses to install malware. The last one I saw for my app was a particularly nasty keylogger; thank God for virtualization, since I was able to easily dispose of the infected snapshot.

People will crack anything just for the challenge of doing so and for more nefarious reasons, and there are apparently a great many who crave hoarding cracked apps as though their hard drive space is completely expendable. Go figure....

[ki4jgt]

Crackers will post anything. It's weird, almost like some sort of hoarding mentality.

One of the apps I make for my clients is almost entirely uninteresting except to sociologists doing qualitative data analysis; very vertical market, not at all visually exciting. Yet just as so many of the app security sites suggest, whenever we post a new version a cracked edition appears on foreign servers within a few days, even though the app is of zero utility to 99.99% of the people getting it from those sites.

With another app I publish I regularly see keygens offered around the web, but the ones I've seen thus far are just Trojan horses to install malware. The last one I saw for my app was a particularly nasty keylogger; thank God for virtualization, since I was able to easily dispose of the infected snapshot.

People will crack anything just for the challenge of doing so and for more nefarious reasons, and there are apparently a great many who crave hoarding cracked apps as though their hard drive space is completely expendable. Go figure....

Wow, the day, I try cracked (OPEN SOURCE) software, I don't know what I will do. How much more cracked can you get than Open Sourced?

[MadCow108]

I guess its not unlikely that there are automated tools which gather software names and publish malware disguising itself as a crack for the programs.
those tools would not care if its free software or not.