Let me just say up front I am not in the business of pirating software.
These days. The 90s was a different story. But I digress.
A few years back, I bought an Auvitek ATSC USB dongle for an XP system. It was cheap and it worked great. It was bundled with "BlazeDTV v3.5" for tuning, recording, playback, etc. Then I upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit and it stopped working. Even after finding the 64-bit drivers for it (after a long hard search) it still wouldn't work. So it sat in a drawer until one day when I "inherited" another XP system. I ran the installation disk, plugged in the dongle, and it asked me for the serial number, which I promptly plugged in.
And the little rat bastard told me I had installed it on too many systems. It refused to run.
Problem was, it was phoning home to check on the serial number. I null routed the mothership, ran setup again, and everything was fine. Can't call home, can't check the serial, can't brick the software. No problem. I made it a permanent entry in my local DNS recursor (PowerDNS).
This worked great for months. It works with Windows 7 32-bit just fine. Then today I was playing around with proxies (as usual) on IE9 (which I don't normally use). Forgot about it and went to watch some TV.
And it wanted the serial number. When I plugged it in it said "FUCK YOU" and refused to run. At that point I remembered I had set IE up with some proxy in God-Know-Where (probably some MikroTik router in Venezuela--those are pretty fast) and it found the mothership.
So here's my (BAD) serial number if you need it...
MU3MJNBK9LRH4-6H8ECXDT5MVA
It's no good. It's used up. Huffed. So I don't feel bad about giving it out.
You need to add this line to your local hosts file:
127.0.0.1 www.blazevideo.com blazevideo.com
And that will kill the mothership, which you will never be able to hit with anything ever again.
Unless you use a Venezuelan proxy (or equivalent).
