« Who cares about the Software Piracy problem anyway? | Home | Top 10 Questions to ask when buying software copy protection »
Giving the software licensing industry the “finger”
By Jon Gillespie-Brown | April 2, 2007
Of course we don’t mean the age-old symbol to ‘go away’ but a reference to an industry obsession with something called a "fingerprint".
Here a Nalpeiron, one of the longest running players in this market, we find the whole concept of a fingerprint sold to customers as a benefit quite laughable.
The theory goes that creating a license data table from a hash of certain hardware pieces in a computer is much more secure…well in some ways this was true 20 years ago but not today! When compared to some very popular solutions that simply use the Mac address of a machine, solutions that take a few more data points are better, but in reality this is one big red herring!
Why? Simply because crackers couldn’t care less…and it’s them we need to protect against.
Indeed the use of a finger print is giving the end user the finger because it means when they upgrade their machine the dumb fingerprint system thinks its a new machine and prevents access to the application - now that’s a great way to upset your customers!
Who cares - you should if you don’t want 1000’s of technical support calls when you implement your shiny new ’super fingerprint’ based copy protection system. I guarantee it will triple your calls.
So let’s forget the silly notion of a fingerprint and simply look at what counts.
You need a secure way to anonymously identify a users machine so you know what machine is what, but you want to do that without inconveniencing the end consumer of the software.
You will also want to secure the license data so it can’t be easily tampered with (read do NOT store it in the registry) and why not keep some useful information on the business rules for that machine and their rights while you are at it. Maybe even a secure data point to allow you to track with other internal systems.
All of this without hampering the end user no matter what they do to their machine - short of crushing it or commercially wiping it.
Here at Nalpeiron we took two years to create and patent such a simple but effective system - all super secure, super friendly and super simple. We called it Protect and Forget (PnF).
It’s one of the modern ways to treat the end user with respect and care, rather than giving them the finger when they change their machine. Protect and Forget (PnF) is not affected by:
Hard drive crashes*
Windows crashes or re-loads
Hard drive re-formats**
Hardware changes i.e. LAN card, motherboard etc
New operating systems or restoring the operating system
Windows upgrades i.e. XP Service Pack 2/ Vista
Norton ghost
Any types of drivers
Other driver or software problems
Utilities or defragmentation
User changes to Windows files or registry
Time changes, re-booting as admin or in safe mode
Re-installing the software
Backdating the computer or copying files to another computer
Utilities or network file server changes
Popularity: 27% [?]
Topics: Software Licensing |
No related posts
Learn more about software copy protection and licensing »
