Earlier this week, one of the "easter eggs" we placed in the builds of DLLs downloaded and reverse-engineered by XtraComponents/ComponentForge became active and some of their products started reporting the following exception (error message):
Key is weak (Application uses unlicensed code.
Check http://rebex.net/infringement/ for info.).
We are sure that their "coders" are now busy searching the stolen code for other nasty surprises like this one – let's hope they'll enjoy it! But beware, date-based error messages might not necessarily be the only "improvements" they got from us ;-)
Some of their customers victims already contacted us. I guess XtraComponents have some explaining to do now.
In other news, we gave XtraComponents a wonderful opportunity last year to prove that their code was not stolen from us after they accused us of lying on a reputable third-party public forum (scroll down a bit) and their blog. Needless to say, instead of taking advantage of that opportunity, they did what they always do after they run out of arguments – they just stopped responding altogether. This kind of behavior actually supports our claim, doesn't it?