Re: Basic instinct
Re: Basic instinct
- Subject: Re: Basic instinct
- From: Miguel Arroz <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 15:30:13 +0100
Hi!
Join the club! :-) Main was cracked about two weeks ago (ok, it
was trivial to crack, I was a little naive on that).
You will ALWAYS have two groups of users: the ones who always pay
(because they can afford it, and they are honest), and the ones who
NEVER pay (they may be able to afford it, but they don't want to
spend money on you). Between the two groups there is a whole
gradient, since people that will most probably buy to people that
will only buy if they really have to (ie, if they don't find a crack).
What you must do is:
1) Offer people good value for their money, as in nice features,
stable app, easy interface, etc, and affordable and/or fair pricing
(sometimes an app may be fair priced, but not affordable by anyone).
2) Make the life of hackers a living hell, but NEVER using
destructive ways to do that. Nice stuff is coding everything related
to the registering in pure C code, using lots of static inline
functions (to make the disassemble harder), have a way to remotely
disable stolen serial numbers, etc, even encrypting the machine code!
NEVER, and I mean NEVER do the file-erasing stuff. Besides being
illegal, you will be hated by the user community, and you will go out
of business quickly. Also, if you live in USA, I wouldn't be
surprised if you were killed by some crazy guy after you trashed all
his stuff (sorry you american guys, but this kind of stuff is way
more common there than in Europe!). Anyway, I know some european guys
that probably would catch a plane to travel your country and hit you
hard! ;-)
So, bottomline... always respect your users, even those who don't
pay. If your app is cracked, at least it means someone is interested
in using it, and that's good. Never over-protect your apps. If you
make using your app legal almost as hard as using it illegaly, people
will crack it. As an example, look at Macromedia stuff... their
stupid registration scheme forces people to crack their stuff when
they change computers (ok, you COULD deactivate the registration on
the old computer, but that's not useful when you remember that after
you formatted or even trashed the old computer).
Yours
Miguel Arroz
On 2005/08/04, at 14:50, Lorenzo wrote:
Hi,
I have just discovered that my application has been cracked. I want to
modify my code. If my app detectes that it has been cracked because
some
variables are turned on but some other are still off (impossible when
properly registered), I show a dialog to the user saying that this
program
has been cracked and if he continues the program will delete all
the files
from the disk. The dialog has 2 buttons: Quit (predefined) and
Continue. If
the user presses Quit, the application quits, but if he presses the
button
Continue, my application really deletes all the files from the disk?
Can I do that?
Is this legal?
Who should I ask to?
Am I too bad?
Best Regards
--
Lorenzo
email: email@hidden
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"I felt like putting a bullet between
the eyes of every Panda that wouldn't
scr*w to save its species." -- Fight Club
Miguel Arroz
http://www.ipragma.com
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