Whois & Analysis for crackhints.com

A key generator (key-gen) is a computer program that generates a product licensing key, such as a serial number, necessary to activate for use of a software application.

Keygens may be legitimately distributed by software manufacturers for licensing software in commercial environments where software has been licensed in bulk for an entire site or enterprise, or they may be developed and distributed illegitimately in circumstances of copyright infringement or software piracy.

A product key, also known as a software key, serial key or activation key, is a specific software-based key for a computer program.

It certifies that the copy of the program is original.

Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost.

Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer.

Shareware is often offered as a download from a website.

Shareware differs from freeware, which is fully-featured software distributed at no cost to the user but without source code being made available; and free and open-source software, in which the source code is freely available for anyone to inspect and alter.

A free license or open license is a license which allows others to reuse another creator’s work as they wish.

Without a special license, these uses are normally prohibited by copyright, patent or commercial license.

Most free licenses are worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and perpetual (see copyright durations).

Free licenses are often the basis of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding projects.

Software cracking (known as "breaking" mostly in the 1980s) is an act of removing copy protection from a software.

Copy protection can be removed by applying a specific crack.

A crack can mean any tool that enables breaking software protection, a stolen product key, or guessed password.

Cracking software generally involves circumventing licensing and usage restrictions on commercial software by illegal methods.

These methods can include modifying code directly through disassembling and bit editing, sharing stolen product keys, or developing software to generate activation keys.

Examples of cracks are: applying a patch or by creating reverse-engineered serial number generators known as keygens, thus bypassing software registration and payments or converting a trial/demo version of the software into fully-functioning software without paying for it.

Software cracking contributes to the rise of online piracy where pirated software is distributed to end-users through filesharing sites like BitTorrent, One click hosting (OCH), or via Usenet downloads, or by downloading bundles of the original software with cracks or keygens.