A BBC article detailing the methods used to prevent software piracy; including using sniffer dogs to hunt down hidden DVDs at customs, and the use of slightly more sophisticated activiation keys.

"You can see that the software manufacturers are trying to move away from a CD key and activation based method to a remote distribution based method, where all the applications and all the software are sitting on a server that they control and you buy time to access that application and you need the credentials to log in," says Dhillon Andrew Kannabhiran, founder of security company Hack in the Box.

"As such there's no longer any software that's sitting on your computer," he adds. "There's nothing for you to download, everything is sitting on their server and they control the mechanism by which you interact with those applications.

Deis via news.bbc.co.uk »