Software giant Symantec last month announced that it will add product activation technology to all of its consumer products, starting with Norton Antivirus 2004. The idea is to prevent large-scale piracy operations from thieves who counterfeit Symantec programs and offer them to customers on the Web. The company estimates at least 3.6 million bogus copies of its programs are sold annually. "As is the case with Microsoft’s product activation, the technology is based upon a key generation algorithm rather than a fixed database of real CD keys. All the key generator seems to be doing is reproducing this logic."

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