Bézier yawned.

He blocked them again—manually, by IP range this time. Rebooted. Ran the keygen one more time, holding his breath.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Leo muttered.

“Autodesk quietly patched the offline activation loophole in a background update. Xforce keygens for 2017 no longer work as of June 2022. Servers reject the handshake. You need to either block all Autodesk services in your firewall completely (not just disable Wi-Fi) or upgrade to a newer crack.”

Leo’s hand hovered over his phone. His friend Mara, the one who’d given him the USB stick two years ago, had warned him: “It works until it doesn’t. Then you’re on your own.”