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Re: Simplest Dongle Method? Making a file uncopyable on CD?
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Re: Simplest Dongle Method? Making a file uncopyable on CD?


  • Subject: Re: Simplest Dongle Method? Making a file uncopyable on CD?
  • From: Nicko van Someren <email@hidden>
  • Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2006 16:41:29 +0100

On 27 Jun 2006, at 00:33, Scott Ribe wrote:

Most of our customers are
'power' users in broadcast and film, very honest, and the
majority acquire latest HW/SW upgrades on a very regular basis.

So then, why waste your time and inconvenience your users?

Absolutely. As mentioned elsewhere, bits are inherently copyable. There are some fairly effective copy protection systems which basically encrypt the majority of the application and decrypt it on the fly using a key held in a USB dongle, but if your users are mostly honest and mostly want to run up to date versions of the application then I would hazard that your biggest risk is going to be people running multiple copies across an office.


There have been endless threads on this list about copy protection and how to make license keys. My favourite is to use digitally signed messages using public key crypto but you should look on the archives for details. I will however add one thing:

Since OS X 10.2 Apple have made it very easy to advertise network services using Bonjour and discover what services are on your local network. Basically you create an NSNetService with suitable name and then you can use an NSNetServiceBrowser to look for what's out there and its delegate gets informed when services are found. This actually provides a very simple and fairly effective way to limit the number of copies of your program that can be run on a _local_ network. All you do is advertise a net service that allows the serial number of your program to be read remotely and have your program also look for all instances of that service, read the serial numbers of the other copies of the program and complain to the user if there are too many copies of the same serial number. While in no way infallible it's very simple to implement and it will in most cases cover the scenario of your professional 'power' users having one licensed copy for which they receive regular updates and which they then run on multiple machines around the office.

Cheers,
	Nicko

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 >Re: Simplest Dongle Method? Making a file uncopyable on CD? (From: Scott Ribe <email@hidden>)

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