Thanks for sharing your experience with it! I'll give it a try soon then, since it seems very safe given what yours and other replies have told me.

For sure google knows about these projects, it doesn't take longer than a few minutes of research to find it. It seems similar to Microsoft's situation with activation, they obviously know about it, but the risk of false positives or loss of convenience screwing regular users is not worth recovering the value lost to a few mod users.