re Peter’s post of 9/11, mostly:
Unfortunately, ad blockers have become an all too common fact of life with many websites. Presumably, they are defending a primary source of revenue, though in effect by saying: “Fine, if you want access to our content, put up with the policy; if not, don’t bother coming here.” Not at all a fan of this trend, but it’s prevalent now. The worst part is that even after you’ve (temporarily) disabled your ad blockers, plus disabled other things like the great, defensive NoScript add-on (which are treated the same as ad blockers, for these purposes), their existence is still detected and you get excluded, shown the “Unwelcome Mat.” Then it becomes a matter of How badly do you want to visit there ? Sometimes enough to overcome the objection.
There are at least a couple other very good, non-torrent sites that cover similar ground as does Appnee, without screening out ad blockers or NoScript . . . but then they hit you with having to solve repeated Captchas, which gets to be rather annoying. Leave the computer for 10 minutes and return — more Captchas ! (Never mind browser extensions: current Opera now has an intrinsic ad blocker turned ON, by default.) Their ain’t much in the way of Free Lunch, except maybe RIGHT HERE ! Even so, nearly half of my posts at GAotD site seem to wind up being zapped by the Admin — such as informative ones about a recent Win-10 privacy offering — despite my being careful to remain civil and to avoid infringing the guidelines. That’s a disservice to readers, who could benefit from the information. [Occasionally a post has gotten zapped _here_, as well.]
In regard to what you termed hardware-based licensing, don’t a whole lot of Windows programs enter unique, license-type strings into the Win Registry, and absent passing that test at program invocation, the app she No a run ? (Or maybe there is a ‘phone-home’ step taking place.)