For the last wo days or so I’ve been suffering from bandwidth troubles. I throttled the children’s upload to 10K so it wasn’t that. Finally I’ve decided to watch the web server logs for a minute, and I’ve noticed a pattern:

63.226.153.189 – – [09/Dec/2008:17:48:05 -0500] “GET /isomaster/wp-content/themes/ISO_master/images/ss-started-vista.png HTTP/1.1” 200 26112 “http://scenereleases.info/category/applications” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; MSN 9.0;MSN 9.1;MSN 9.6; MSNbQ002; MSNmen-us; MSNcOTH)”

Going to the referrer page I found a cracked version of ISO Master – NFO file and everything. I saved the file to make sure some anti-piracy idiot doesn’t delete it.

This is a huge boost to my self-confidence. I’ve always dreamed, and never dared hope, that someone would bother creating a crack for ISO Master. After all, it’s nowhere near as popular as its competitors (unlike Linux, Windows has a few established players in this space).

As to that more people will get it for free now, heh – as they say “a small percentage of something is much better than 100% of nothing”. This is free promotion for me that I could never afford to do myself, I simply don’t have the resources. The more people have it, the more people will know about it, the more people will pay for it.

And if that’s not how it ends up, so be it. I am flattered that my software’s been cracked, and if I find out who did it I’ll buy them a beer.

I may even get off my ass and update the Windows version now, it’s two minors behind the Linux version, and GTK had some nice improvements since.