I've seen quite a few instances of string resources like "I need this money to feed my family," or more humorous "so you think you're leet, do you?"-type phrases placed near easily-defeated serial validation code in binaries.
A lot of the funnier strings convinced me to give money to the authors of software I'd never have purchased or used to start with (I used to download a lot of shareware just to explore its copy protection).
Famously, Mac OS X also contains the "Don't Steal Mac OS X" poem mapped into virtual address space by DSMOS.kext.
The people cracking/pirating software are just as human as the authors - any kind of communication at a personal level increases the chance of a sale IMO.
If the software thought you were running it under a debugger it would try to trash the disk. Unfortunately several errors made the software think it was running under a debugger even if it wasn't, and a few people lost data.
I'd imagine doing something like this nowadays would result in litigation. There are stories of older apps doing all kinds of unsavory shenanigans:
(http://www.geocities.ws/johnboy_tutorials/bt.html) (yes, that IS a geocities link)
Some as benign as popping a "gotcha" message like the author here, some as evil as nuking the registry or boot sector. The armchair lawyer in me wonders what would happen if someone who had their drive trashed by gotcha code like this initiated legal action.
I'll never forget that near the store decryption code in iTunes, there was a 16-byte string that stood out like an AES key: DontMessWithThis. It was added a bit after I started releasing code to order from the iTunes Music Store and they started changing the crypto with each release. AFAIK, it's still there to this day, though I haven't checked in a couple years.
A lot of the funnier strings convinced me to give money to the authors of software I'd never have purchased or used to start with (I used to download a lot of shareware just to explore its copy protection).
Famously, Mac OS X also contains the "Don't Steal Mac OS X" poem mapped into virtual address space by DSMOS.kext.
The people cracking/pirating software are just as human as the authors - any kind of communication at a personal level increases the chance of a sale IMO.