I own logica audio platinum (puchased by apple) which I know had a huge development cost on the protection algorithm of XSKEY. XSKEY was a mini USB harddrive dongle that actually wrote encrypted hash's into the KEY and authorized software... it was suppose to be the end all of dongle's and was suppose to be virutally unhackable... I paid 2,000 dollars for this program (with many upgrades) and even though i felt like I was getting a great product I hated that stupid key. a bad power failure on my USB hub cauesd the hub to flicker on and off rapidly and it damaged my key. i had to wait a month to get a new dongle sent and had to have all my authorizations revoked and reinstaed through 3 different channels of customer support, databases, all this work. and after all that, i look on the internet, and there is a readlity avaliable XSKEY dongle hack for logic audio... (sadface) Like many people have stated above me in this thread... dongle's only hurt the people that buy the actual product. The company spends money on a protection algorithm, manufacturing costs, development of the USB stick / code / challenge response / whatever... and it only thwarts the guy who buys the simulator and tries to share it with his friend... (not that its ok to do this). meanwhile, 12 year old kids with minimal computer experience can download realflight g3 with a dongle emulator and not only can they run the full thing, they can run it with their own transmitter plugged in without having to piggyback it to a giant interlink extra transmitter. all i am saying is, if your mission is to thwart every hacker, just make sure you don't alienate your legal customer base by making them jump through flaming hoops... because all those hoops mean nothing if the program is hacked and cracked, which I know realflight 3.5 is. especially if the cracked version offers a feature that legal customers are begging for (the ability to use 1 transmitter and not piggyback a interlink).. then something is drastically wrong.