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Henry Roberts mentioned in the history of software copy protection
By Jon Gillespie-Brown | February 5, 2007
Poacher turned gamekeeper is the best description for Henry Roberts, CTO and co-founder of Nalpeiron.
In the early 1980’s Henry was one of only a handful of experts on software copy protection. Not only did he actually write a great deal of the products to break copy protection in those days he then decided to create better solutions for Apple and then himself that made that process more effective in his own products.
Soon after he decided to make a better copy protection solution since he knew all the ways to break the competition.
Since those days he has kept at the forefront of the industry with the development from those days of floppy disks to today’s highly sophisticated and secure activation based systems.
The article on Wikipedia that mentions Henry can be found below, it’s most interesting:
…..For some time, Locksmith continued to defeat virtually all of the copy protection systems in existence. The next advance came from Henry Roberts thesis on software copy protection, which devised a way of replacing Apple’s sync field of FFs, with random appearing patterns of bytes. Because the graduate student had frequent copy protection discussions with Apple’s copy protection engineer, Apple developed a copy protection system which made use of this technique.
Henry Roberts then wrote a competitive program to Locksmith, Back It UP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_copy_protection#Copy_protection_for_computer_software
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