Question about illegal software?

Welcome to the world of Warez! It sounds like you would be suprised at the number of illegal copies of software are actually being used. Games, movies, music, programs... anything and everything (mostly) can be found online illegally. Of course, its not right; its illegal, but that doesn't stop the millions of people from doing it.

The problem is, its so easy to do and the effort it takes to track people down is usually not worth it for most companies. If they wanted to get serious, they could find him and get the money he owes them, but chances are, he'll never be caught.

It really depends on the software. Some software does what is called 'phone home' or report on active users of the software and reports if it is legitimately licensed or not. However, with that said most pirated software or cracked software removes these checks fromt he software so the developer or manufacturer won't have any mechanism to track these pirated copies since their defenses and checks have been removed. So he very well could be right in that they have no way of knowing he is using cracked/pirated software. Sometimes however, some developers have been doing a little trickery in such that it will allow the cracks to disable the 1st line of defense of protecting the software and will function like a 100% legitimately purchased software BUT it will passively phone home and let the developer know that it has been cracked. This is normally not done to bust or arrest or bring a case or anything against the end user but more to track statistically how much of their software is pirated vs how much is actually purchased and licensed.

Typically most protection mechanisms seems designed to defeat casual copying of software but for those with the knowledge and want to use pirated/cracked software there is normally someone somewhere that will figure out a way around all of the checks on the software and enable a full version restriction free and make it available to whoever downloads it. Its a big cat and mouse game with the crackers vs the developers. I think Ubisoft probably has one of the most sophisticated and as of now still uncracked protection mechanism that they used in their Assassin Creed II video game since the entire game is not actually on the physical disk. The rest of the game is stored on their servers and if you loose connection to their server for any reason the game stops working. This is a great protection mechanism from the developer perspective but it's really bad for the end users since Ubisoft's servers have been having TONs of issues preventing the legitimate customers from even playing the game at all either offline or online because their servers are not behaving as designed. So with all that said ... it depends on the software and how strong/detailed their mechanism for preventing pirating/cracking of the software and how interested they are in tracking this activity. Some companies are more interested in it than others.

Odds are that the software he's using is a hack, which shows up completely legitimate (even though it ain't). Reporting him will probably cause nothing to change/happen. They really can't track HIM down, but they can get who hacked the software. Mostly because the hacker signed it and advertised that he hacked it.

you could instead tell the persons involved that there are legal methods for obtaining lots of free alternatives for doing mathematics of various types. just google Open Source Math or Computer Algebra System. several such packages are Maxima, Axiom, Reduce, yacas, guyacas. for doing visual symbolic math there is eigenmath, and Smath.

It is very possible he could be tracked down if there was a watchdoger on that site.

There is also the option of someone called 888-no-piracy to report him/her.