Best place to hide license files (was Re: [now OT] Licensing/Implementing in Cocoa/Obj-C - Interest in product?)
Best place to hide license files (was Re: [now OT] Licensing/Implementing in Cocoa/Obj-C - Interest in product?)
- Subject: Best place to hide license files (was Re: [now OT] Licensing/Implementing in Cocoa/Obj-C - Interest in product?)
- From: "M. Uli Kusterer" <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 17:06:12 +0200
At 13:54 Uhr +0200 16.04.2004, Stiphane Sudre wrote:
On 16 avr. 2004, at 13:29, M. Uli Kusterer wrote:
BTW -- anybody have a good idea where to put the "counter" or
"expiry date" files for such a scheme on OS X? In OS 9 we used to
just create invisible files at the root level of the hard disk
(can't use "Preferences" or "Application Support/MyApp", that'd be
too obvious).
One idea could be not to make them invisible, but to make them
visible yet not distinguishable.
You mean like, have three "MyApp Preferences" files in ~/Library
Preferences/, duplicating the data in there, and having one of them
be queried for the actual licensing info, and using the other three
for sanity checks?
Well, a user would still be able to just delete the Prefs files (all
three of them). I think having the file named something that doesn't
look like your app would be a better choice in this case.
Of course, one could go the route that virus back then did and name
it something like an Apple file. ".DS_Store " (with the space to
avoid stepping on the Finder's toes) or whatever, or
"com.apple.holdsemfromfluppin.plist", or whatever.
Still, as long as it's visible and in Preferences, I don't think
it'd be too hard to find it. The old trick of giving all files in
Preferences a label, and then finding the new ones by picking out the
ones that have no label comes to mind.
What folders are we allowed to write to? Preferences, Application
Support? Any others? Put it in Documents or Desktop?
Hmmm... another blasphemous thought: Would it be bad if I just added
a key to one of Apple's plists? I mean, if I gave it a very long,
unique name, there'd be no collisions ...? But I guess I could
accidentally screw up that file. And who knows whether Apple's apps
(System Preferences etc.) would preserve my key or overwite it...
hmmm... but maybe as a fallback location to detect whether the user
deleted the actual registration file...?
--
Cheers,
M. Uli Kusterer
------------------------------------------------------------
"The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..."
http://www.zathras.de
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