Re: Protecting Software w/ Software License Keys...
Re: Protecting Software w/ Software License Keys...
- Subject: Re: Protecting Software w/ Software License Keys...
- From: Jeff LaMarche <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2002 21:59:24 -0700
On Saturday, June 15, 2002, at 04:24 PM, Erik J. Barzeski wrote:
>
But also like I said: if people want to crack your app, they will. Period.
>
I've never seen a fail-safe registration code system. They can't be done,
>
simply because if you can create a code, you can reverse engineer a code.
Or, in most cases, simply replace your fancy registration method with one
that simply returns YES (or whatever would do it), or you could drop a JSR
in front of the call to your method so that the program simply skips over
all the code that checks for the existence of the code and launches right
into the "meat" of the program.
I've witnessed both sides of copy protection - I work as a software developer,
but for many years I also tried to keep abreast of what was going on in the
cracking scene (although I've lost touch with it now). My feeling on this
is that the best you can hope for with copy protection is to slow down the
piracy and stop casual copying, and you're deluding yourself if you think
otherwise. The hardcore pirates will break anything you can come up with if
they want to use your program.
Remember the hardware dongles that a lot of high-end 3-D programs (Lightwave,
EIAS) used a few years ago for copy protection (do they still use them?)? These
keys used encryption that was performed outside of the system and they were
touted in magazines like MacTech and Dr. Dobbs as the "only sure-fire" anti-piracy
method. They were anything but. A guy I "knew" (never met him in person, but
"knew" him in the Internet sense of the word) wrote an extension of about
35 lines of code that would sniff packets off of the ADB bus (on the Mac, the
dongles usually went on the ADB bus). As a result, the crack for these high-end
programs was usually available on First Class and Hotline boards within days
of the program being released, sometimes within days of it going gold, and
it usually consisted of a small extension that would emulate the dongle.
Personally, I give away everything I write that's not work related (i.e. anything
I write for the Mac) because I do it for fun and to grow as a developer and
because I don't have the ability to take on any support obligations. I just
released an open-source cocoa framework (well quasi-framework, I haven't packaged
it as a framework yet) and application for generating barcodes that provides
all the functionality of programs I've seen selling for hundreds of dollars.
That's not a very effective strategy for those of you looking to pay bills
and put food on the table from writing Mac software, though =).
- Jeff
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