There was a story that made the rounds a few months ago about how some automotive licensing scheme was broken when someone googled the public key used to sign the code and found it in a link to a StackOverflow post for an example of how to do code signing, complete with the corresponding private key also included in the post.

I think more likely than not that was an instance of some Indian programmer implementing the licensing, but In my own career when I've been asked to implement software licensing (which I'm always a bit uncomfortable doing) I either pushed for very basic things like flags in config files or when that failed didn't go out of my way to make the licenses very difficult to crack.

There's an opportunity here for technical people who want to dissent against this modern state of things to wage a war on two fronts. One is obvious: the gray/black hats who crack the systems. The other one for those implementing these things in the corporate world is to simply do a (plausibly deniably) bad job designing and implementing them, to make the gray/black hats jobs easier.

You know how you're always complaining about how your boss doesn't understand what you do or give you enough time to do it? Well with the right mindset and goals those things are blessings in disguise.