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I’ve been meaning to post something about Spark and piracy for a while now, but I’ve been unsure of whether that would be a good idea – I’ve been avoiding unnecessarily advertising the fact that Spark is (at this point) rampantly pirated. However, I’ve been getting an alarming amount of Market comments recently that claim that Spark has somehow “hacked” their Xbox Live account – which is not only patently false, but also impossible.

There are many possible ways that one can hack an Xbox Live account – including brute force attacks on the site, and guessing of simple, or easy to guess passwords. My assumption, for the sake of brevity of this article is that you use good, difficult to guess passwords – and if you don’t, you should. See Change Passwords for hints on picking a good password.

That said, I know for fact that a large number of people use illegitimate versions of the app. This is backed by the fact that sales of the app spike considerably whenever Xbox Live makes changes that break Spark in short term, and Google search results. Often, people who use a pirated copy of the app end up liking it, then purchasing the legitimate copy. This scares me most of all, because the people who just now purchased a legitimate product spent any number of weeks with a pirated version that could have been siphoning off account information for weeks or months at a time. If/when their account information is stolen, one of their first reactions is to post accusations in the comments, which unfortunately, causes a large number of other knee-jerk reactions.

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