Orca and Activatenow

Recently i came across activate now as a "so called" advanced activation service wherein one could embed custom actions in the msi package while building a Visual Studio MSI project for activating the product using Activatenow SDK.

Not that i needed to use any specific software, I was just curious to know how secure would that be and just tried to bypass the protection.

ORCA is a MSI Database Editor tool which i used to remove the custom action and the product installed just fine.

I wonder is there a real security with software until both software and hardware vendors work hand in hand to develop a strong licensing mechanism. But of course, most people will not like it (I am one of them), but just looking at the different options available today, there can be hard to break protections but not 100% foolproof. But what the heck! Cryptography is all about the limitation of computing power versus mathematical complexity!

Disclaimer: The post contains a description of how the protection was bypassed as a part of my studies, this does not constitute an act of reverse engineering or trying to break any specific software for commercial or personal benefit. However, if this post is offending to any parties they can contact me and i shall remove this post.