This week everyone has been falling over themselves to get their hands on the fantastic new Zebra 2 soft synth from independent developer u-he.
However, some people have been trying to get the goodies without handing over cash by downloading cracked versions of the software. Unfortunately for these unscrupulous cyber-criminals the pirated version of Zebra 2 isn't all it's cracked up to be. After a few hours use the interface starts to melt away until the plug-in is totally unusable!
U-he coder Urs Heckman appears to have, for the moment at least, succeeded where countless software developers have failed in outfoxing the cracking teams. We asked him whether he thought he'd beaten the pirates for good:
"I believe that everything will be cracked. I'm just very happy that I could bitchslap them for a couple of days. As I understand, crackers are proud of their releases, so a failing crack takes a bit of their pride away."
"I believe that I have found a principle that will give them a really hard time to break. I'm already discussing this with selected developers, so that we will work together on the topic in future! We'll share experience, designs, concepts and even code."
"We will not necessarily profit from this financially, as we believe that most crack users wouldn't buy anyway. But each crack is a slap into the face of our legit customers who support us with their hard earned money. That's why I want to do stronger copy protection that still is not too intrusive as to punish the users."
Check out Zebra 2 and download the demo here.
