1. It is well known that internal affairs departments don't do anything. Complaints are summarily dismissed. 2. My city doesn't have a citizen review board. 3. See 2. 4. The cop who attacked me was a state police officer. And the idea that they would go after another cop is laughable. 5. Are you serious?
Bottom line, there actually isn't any oversight or anyone to complain to. A state trooper attacked me, beat me severely and strangled me in front of a a whole bunch of other state troopers. If another cop hadn't finally pulled him off of me he would have killed me for sure. So I guess at least some of them are human.
What did I do to deserve a damaged windpipe, cracked ribs, damaged legs, and a severe concussion? I swore at the officer in reply to him swearing at me. Needless to say he didn't take kindly to a mere civilian disrespecting him in front of his peers and flew into a violent rage. Unfortunately my state does allow DUI roadblocks. I was just driving down the road minding my own business. I don't drink or do illegal drugs.
They don't need to control themselves because they know they can literally get away with anything. Including murder. Police in the US are a gang of thugs and should be treated accordingly. I wouldn't have disrespected a member of a street gang in LA in a deserted parking lot with no witnesses even if he had disrespected me first. Now I'm facing all kinds of false criminal charges and legal bills adding up to nearly a year of my income. That's what they mean by, "You might beat the rap but you won't beat the ride." As soon as I get the chance I'm going to move to a state where such road blocks are not allowed, but in the long run I'd like to leave this insane country. I've lived in other countries and the cops are not, as a rule, violent thugs like they are here. They are sometimes even real people and not angry, raging animals. As someone else posted, outside of certain urban slum areas, your greatest chance of being a victim of a violent crime is from an encounter with the police. I have always avoided them for this reason, but that night I had no way to avoid them.
A facebook page is intended to be more or less private. This is like having a judge order someone to amend entries in a personal diary. Inevitably that will be the next step if it hasn't happened already. This is going to be another slippery slope toward a police state. Mark my words. We are going to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the next decade. The problem with our dying republic is that the majority of citizens only want freedom for themselves.
I added this to my list of star systems to send messages to. Finding a planet in the system with so much water certainly seems promising. If only the professionals were doing active SETI. We should be messaging every single one of these promising systems. The declination of this system is around +5 degrees, which is conveniently close to the Arecibo dish zenith. Most promising systems that are also close by are far enough into the southern sky that Arecibo can't target them, but this one is right in its crosshairs.
Obviously this planet is not likely to contain life as we know it, but it might contain a more exotic form of life or if that planet is the Venus of Gliese 1214 then maybe there is an earth-like planet further out that we haven't detected.
Well if you have this power then please use it. Vote to abolish the TSA. It wouldn't have stopped this atrocity, but it would prevent children from being molested by government agents before they are ready. Or did you mean that "we", as a nation, have some sort of power? Please. Such BS. Such magical thinking. There is no real thing that has this power. It is imaginary. Only individual people actually exist and those people generally can't agree on anything and tend to lean toward whatever sucks the most for everyone. So that's what we get. Child molesting airport security, big brother, and a police state. Did we vote for all that? I guess we did.
Neither worked for my circadian rhythm issues, but melatonin worked much better than the blue light while it worked. The blue light in the morning didn't alter my clock at all. The melatonin did keep things steady for about 1 lunar cycle though.
There is a name for the disorder now. Well if it really is a disorder. It is called Non-24 or sometimes N24. Not a great name, but what can you do?
I have struggled with this for years. I don't understand how others who have this can hold down any kind of normal 8 hr per day job. Every time I try I end up getting fired for being late during the half of my cycle when I can only sleep during the day.
I have a Philips GoLite and after many trials I can confidently say that it does not work for me. It does not change my +2 hr per day cycle. Also it gave me headaches in the morning after I used it. I tried turning down the brightness to the lowest level and not looking directly at it. Nothing helped, but then I am prone to headaches. It is a cool gadget though.
I recently tried melatonin. It did work for me at first. For almost a month in fact. But then it just stopped working. I tried many different dosages both higher and lower, but it doesn't seem to do much. I still think it's a good idea to take 1 mg or less of timed release melatonin 1-2 hours before you want to sleep. Melatonin has a very short half life so extended release is pretty much mandatory. I tried a number of brands and the 1 mg Natrol brand worked best for me, but, as I said, it seemed to stop working.
Dark therapy is my next goal. It is not so easy though. Most lighting that you would think would work for it doesn't. Or at least shouldn't. The idea is that after sunset you should not be seeing any blue light at all and in fact even green, yellow and orange light seem to suppress melatonin according to some studies. Just not as much as blue. The only wavelengths that don't seem to suppress melatonin or at least only have a negligible effect are right around the very edge of the visible spectrum above 690 nm.
There is no natural sort of lighting that will give you that. Not low pressure sodium. Not neon. Not salt lamps. The only option is LED lighting and commercial far red or near infrared lights don't exist. I plan to build my own 700, 720, and 740 nm lights using high power LEDs in order to properly test out this dark therapy thing. If that doesn't work then I'm out of options.
I've also tried spending all day outside doing some kind of strenuous activity as much as possible. That doesn't seem to work for me either. Certainly not the same day. I find that physical strenuous activity doesn't make me mentally tired. It makes my muscles tired, but not my brain. Studying advanced math and physics all day is more likely to make me tired. I think sleep is more of a brain recharging system. Even if spending all day outdoors did cure me, I wouldn't want to live that kind of life.
I have one of them gadgets. Hasn't helped me a bit. It makes a cool (but expensive) alarm clock though. Maybe it's because I'm 40ish and have become immune to blue wavelengths.
I personally think the UDK license is pure genius. I couldn't believe it when I read it. But game engines are mostly useful for commercial projects. Unlike a video editor which can be used for editing youtube videos and home movies.
It's not about DRM restriction, it's about convenience and value.
For you maybe. I won't buy software with any sort of draconian DRM. Period. The way I think of it is that with DRM I am paying money, but I'm not really getting anything concrete in return for it. I'm just getting approval for the temporary use of the software and that is just not worth it for me. I have no interest in a software rental system. I want to own it and be able to use the software on any computer I want until approximately the end of time. I used to buy software in the 90s right up until the point that the copy protection became so sophisticated that I couldn't make backup copies anymore. That was the last straw for me. Now I never buy software that has any DRM at all. This includes Steam. One of my favorite games is only available on Steam. I would love to buy it, but it's not for sale. Even years after release there is only a Steam version. So what can I do? I'm stuck living with the TPB version until the publisher perhaps one day removes their heads from their asses or GOG starts selling it.
You're right. It would fix the problem. Because no one in their right mind is going to spend $10,000 on video editing software that runs on a remote server. Most people wouldn't even spend $10 for that. I know I wouldn't.
Every major software company I know of has been pirated like crazy and yet they still seem to be profitable. I wonder how they all do it? Are there any of the really huge companies that did not in fact practically encourage piracy in the beginning? Let's see Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk... How could they possibly have been so stupid. If they had just talked to you they could have simply used ironclad DRM and they would be rich by now. Rich! Last time I checked the CEOs of those companies are still eating out of garbage cans. If only they had used stronger DRM.
I would answer this guys question with a question. Let's say you can make $250,000 per year and feel secure in knowing that you have created one of the world's first truly uncrackable DRM systems and that not a single person on the whole planet is using it without paying for it. Or you can make $400,000 the first year, $600,000 the second year, and $800,000 the third year, but you have to go through life knowing that millions of people are using your software for free. I know which one I would choose. I'd do things the Microsoft/Adobe/Autodesk way. I'd rather someone buy my software of course, but if they are going to pirate someone's software I'd want it to be mine.
But money is not everything. I know that to some people that feeling of people not using their software without paying is better than having hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank. And for those people draconian DRM really is the right choice. Sure they will lose a good number of potential customers to competitors with less draconian DRM schemes, but they don't get that euphoric feeling of beating the crackers and thwarting all the would be free riders who have to resort to using and learning someone else's software that does pretty much the same thing as yours, but without the annoying DRM.
You mean try to actually contact the downloader personally? That's an interesting idea but how would you implement that? All you'd have is an IP address. I guess you'd have to get contact information from the ISP. It would put a new twist on guiltware if you were contacted personally by the developer asking you why you were downloading it. Of course lots of times it may be an innocent reason like getting a fully functional demo but the devs are never gonna believe that.
If dongles work so well then why is it that most of the popular software that uses a dongle has been cracked? For unpopular software lots of stuff hasn't been cracked even without a dongle or complex DRM. I'd like to see some success stories with popular software I'm familiar with. Obviously if crackers haven't tried to crack that is not a success story. That's security through obscurity. I'm referring to cases where a dongle was used and crackers attempted to crack it but gave up. One advantage of software is that it is not a physical item which is subject to the laws of entropy. All physical items will break eventually, but a series of zeros and ones can last forever. So you are reducing the value of your product by making it into something physical which will only survive for some limited period of time.
I find it amusing when you talk about an "incredibly short period of time". You mean like a clock cycle? Pretty much all blocks of time in the software world are incredibly short. That has nothing to do with how difficult the code is to reverse engineer. The problem with doing so much processing on the dongle itself is speed. That solution is only practical for software that is not resource intensive. It does sound like one of the better options though. Certainly better than requiring an internet connection all the time. If there are speed problems interfacing with the USB dongle, there are much worse bottlenecks relying on the quality of someone's internet connection. It also saves you from needing to keep your servers up and available for the next several thousand years. Of course you better be selling a unique product if you do this because otherwise people will just use a competing product that doesn't have annoying USB dongles to be lost/destroyed or which just fail on their own over time.
I think the answer to the original question depends on which is more important to you: getting more paying customers or stopping unauthorized users. Some developers would rather make less money but feel the security of knowing that not a single person will use their software without paying. Others just want to make as much money as possible from their work and don't care about free riders. Two different philosophies. To me neither is right or wrong.
I think you stumbled upon one problem I have found with demo versions that unintentionally encourages piracy. If you disable the versions too much, like your 3 minute limit example, people will just go to TPB to get a fully functional trial version. Or, if the software is sufficiently obscure that TPB doesn't have a crack then you might try to crack it yourself if you have the skill. I would say that at least half the demo software I download is too disabled to give you any real sense of how the software compares to its competitors. If no crack is available I just end up using and in some cases buying software from the competition. I'm not going to buy software that I can't test properly first.
So the first step is this : always-on Internet connection. There's is no issue here: we're living in a connected world and virtually all your users are already always connected.
The part about "living in a connected world" is pure fantasy. A couple of years ago I lived within 10 miles of a capital city and there was no home internet available at all. Not even dial up. I lived there for about 9 months. I survived by going to internet cafes when I needed to communicate with the intertubes. This was not in the US, but there are plenty of places in the US with only local dial-up or only long distance dial-up.
You will never hear from all the potential customers that you didn't get because they were turned off by the always connected requirement. What if you go out of business? Will you keep your servers going forever? Because forever is what companies without always on DRM are selling.
As long as it has to communicate data across the internet for more than just key checking purposes it will be slow. Even if your performance hit is "minimized" your software will still seem sluggish compared to your competitors. So in order to stop the pirates you've just reduced the value of your software to your potential customers. On the plus side the more sluggish your software gets the fewer people will use it and the less likely anyone will bother to crack it. So that would really be a two pronged attack on piracy. For applications like word processors it might work though and because hardly anyone would want to use an always connected word processor you'd have the additional benefit of keeping a low profile. Security through obscurity. But it least it might work, unlike most DRM schemes.
If you go that route it means you can't have a demo version available. Or rather, you can but risk putting off a genuine buyer by being a dick and accusing them of being a pirate when they are just legitimately trying out the software to compare it against your competitors. That's a great way to lose customers *and* encourage them to download the TPB version just to spite you.
I've never understood software companies that expect you to buy their product without testing it first. That would be like buying a car without driving it first. Or even seeing it.
I think Pro Tools does something like this. Or used to. I see that Avid bought them now. I think trying to integrate your software with real hardware is not a bad idea from a piracy standpoint if you can get away with it. I just checked on demonoid (TPB is down for some reason) and there are no versions of Pro Tools 10 available. There is one cracked or partially cracked version of Pro Tools 9 for OSX however.
Whatever function you put on the dongle can be read and copied to a binary file on your hard drive. Or the nature of the functions can be worked out from the surrounding code.
Are you saying that a team of programmers actually hand codes 35,000 different versions of code that actually performs essentially the same tasks? That is interesting. Can you give some examples of software that uses this system?
I've always thought it would be interesting to release a program where 90% of the code is actually DRM, all of it hand coded. It might take years or decades of coding, but you would have succeeded in the holy grail: uncrackable software. Or at least uncrackable in the time frames that any sane cracker would spend on it. Of course, if you spend most of your CPU time executing DRM code instead of application code any competitors you had would have a distinct speed advantage, but I guess the point of the exercise would just be to prove that it could be done, given enough time and money and effort.
Have you ever done any video editing? You do realize that video editing is resource intensive? If you tried to run the software from a remote server it would be an absolute performance nightmare. You'd be famous for creating the slowest video editing software known to man.
I agree, however, that remote execution is the only way to prevent your software from getting cracked. Essentially the program never leaves the company servers. Crackers can't crack what they don't have. Another "solution" is to release software that is so bad or that does something so useless that no one will bother to crack it. Or there is always security through obscurity. Don't tell anyone about the software. Keep it a secret. If people don't know about the existence of the software they can't crack it.
How would you prevent the cracker from uploading this data from the dongle to produce an emulator? All you'd have to do is copy the data into a binary file and modify the API so that it looks for the file on the SATA bus instead of on a USB drive. The cracker could even ask users to put the file on a USB stick if necessary. In order for your method to work you would first need a method to make binary data uncopyable.
That's an interesting idea, but what if one of your customers copies that code from the dongle and uploads it to the intertubes where cracker groups can just insert it back where it belongs. It might also slow down the program. For a word processor that might not be noticeable, but for something like video editing it probably would slow it down noticeably. Then you'd have the usual situation of even paying customers feeling pressure to download the noticeably faster version from TPB.
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1. It is well known that internal affairs departments don't do anything. Complaints are summarily dismissed.
2. My city doesn't have a citizen review board.
3. See 2.
4. The cop who attacked me was a state police officer. And the idea that they would go after another cop is laughable.
5. Are you serious?
Bottom line, there actually isn't any oversight or anyone to complain to. A state trooper attacked me, beat me severely and strangled me in front of a a whole bunch of other state troopers. If another cop hadn't finally pulled him off of me he would have killed me for sure. So I guess at least some of them are human.
What did I do to deserve a damaged windpipe, cracked ribs, damaged legs, and a severe concussion? I swore at the officer in reply to him swearing at me. Needless to say he didn't take kindly to a mere civilian disrespecting him in front of his peers and flew into a violent rage. Unfortunately my state does allow DUI roadblocks. I was just driving down the road minding my own business. I don't drink or do illegal drugs.
They don't need to control themselves because they know they can literally get away with anything. Including murder. Police in the US are a gang of thugs and should be treated accordingly. I wouldn't have disrespected a member of a street gang in LA in a deserted parking lot with no witnesses even if he had disrespected me first. Now I'm facing all kinds of false criminal charges and legal bills adding up to nearly a year of my income. That's what they mean by, "You might beat the rap but you won't beat the ride." As soon as I get the chance I'm going to move to a state where such road blocks are not allowed, but in the long run I'd like to leave this insane country. I've lived in other countries and the cops are not, as a rule, violent thugs like they are here. They are sometimes even real people and not angry, raging animals. As someone else posted, outside of certain urban slum areas, your greatest chance of being a victim of a violent crime is from an encounter with the police. I have always avoided them for this reason, but that night I had no way to avoid them.
A facebook page is intended to be more or less private. This is like having a judge order someone to amend entries in a personal diary. Inevitably that will be the next step if it hasn't happened already. This is going to be another slippery slope toward a police state. Mark my words. We are going to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the next decade. The problem with our dying republic is that the majority of citizens only want freedom for themselves.
I added this to my list of star systems to send messages to. Finding a planet in the system with so much water certainly seems promising. If only the professionals were doing active SETI. We should be messaging every single one of these promising systems. The declination of this system is around +5 degrees, which is conveniently close to the Arecibo dish zenith. Most promising systems that are also close by are far enough into the southern sky that Arecibo can't target them, but this one is right in its crosshairs.
Obviously this planet is not likely to contain life as we know it, but it might contain a more exotic form of life or if that planet is the Venus of Gliese 1214 then maybe there is an earth-like planet further out that we haven't detected.
Well if you have this power then please use it. Vote to abolish the TSA. It wouldn't have stopped this atrocity, but it would prevent children from being molested by government agents before they are ready. Or did you mean that "we", as a nation, have some sort of power? Please. Such BS. Such magical thinking. There is no real thing that has this power. It is imaginary. Only individual people actually exist and those people generally can't agree on anything and tend to lean toward whatever sucks the most for everyone. So that's what we get. Child molesting airport security, big brother, and a police state. Did we vote for all that? I guess we did.
Neither worked for my circadian rhythm issues, but melatonin worked much better than the blue light while it worked. The blue light in the morning didn't alter my clock at all. The melatonin did keep things steady for about 1 lunar cycle though.
There is a name for the disorder now. Well if it really is a disorder. It is called Non-24 or sometimes N24. Not a great name, but what can you do?
I have struggled with this for years. I don't understand how others who have this can hold down any kind of normal 8 hr per day job. Every time I try I end up getting fired for being late during the half of my cycle when I can only sleep during the day.
I have a Philips GoLite and after many trials I can confidently say that it does not work for me. It does not change my +2 hr per day cycle. Also it gave me headaches in the morning after I used it. I tried turning down the brightness to the lowest level and not looking directly at it. Nothing helped, but then I am prone to headaches. It is a cool gadget though.
I recently tried melatonin. It did work for me at first. For almost a month in fact. But then it just stopped working. I tried many different dosages both higher and lower, but it doesn't seem to do much. I still think it's a good idea to take 1 mg or less of timed release melatonin 1-2 hours before you want to sleep. Melatonin has a very short half life so extended release is pretty much mandatory. I tried a number of brands and the 1 mg Natrol brand worked best for me, but, as I said, it seemed to stop working.
Dark therapy is my next goal. It is not so easy though. Most lighting that you would think would work for it doesn't. Or at least shouldn't. The idea is that after sunset you should not be seeing any blue light at all and in fact even green, yellow and orange light seem to suppress melatonin according to some studies. Just not as much as blue. The only wavelengths that don't seem to suppress melatonin or at least only have a negligible effect are right around the very edge of the visible spectrum above 690 nm.
There is no natural sort of lighting that will give you that. Not low pressure sodium. Not neon. Not salt lamps. The only option is LED lighting and commercial far red or near infrared lights don't exist. I plan to build my own 700, 720, and 740 nm lights using high power LEDs in order to properly test out this dark therapy thing. If that doesn't work then I'm out of options.
I've also tried spending all day outside doing some kind of strenuous activity as much as possible. That doesn't seem to work for me either. Certainly not the same day. I find that physical strenuous activity doesn't make me mentally tired. It makes my muscles tired, but not my brain. Studying advanced math and physics all day is more likely to make me tired. I think sleep is more of a brain recharging system. Even if spending all day outdoors did cure me, I wouldn't want to live that kind of life.
I have one of them gadgets. Hasn't helped me a bit. It makes a cool (but expensive) alarm clock though. Maybe it's because I'm 40ish and have become immune to blue wavelengths.
I personally think the UDK license is pure genius. I couldn't believe it when I read it. But game engines are mostly useful for commercial projects. Unlike a video editor which can be used for editing youtube videos and home movies.
It's not about DRM restriction, it's about convenience and value.
For you maybe. I won't buy software with any sort of draconian DRM. Period. The way I think of it is that with DRM I am paying money, but I'm not really getting anything concrete in return for it. I'm just getting approval for the temporary use of the software and that is just not worth it for me. I have no interest in a software rental system. I want to own it and be able to use the software on any computer I want until approximately the end of time. I used to buy software in the 90s right up until the point that the copy protection became so sophisticated that I couldn't make backup copies anymore. That was the last straw for me. Now I never buy software that has any DRM at all. This includes Steam. One of my favorite games is only available on Steam. I would love to buy it, but it's not for sale. Even years after release there is only a Steam version. So what can I do? I'm stuck living with the TPB version until the publisher perhaps one day removes their heads from their asses or GOG starts selling it.
SaaS, that in fact does fix the problem.
You're right. It would fix the problem. Because no one in their right mind is going to spend $10,000 on video editing software that runs on a remote server. Most people wouldn't even spend $10 for that. I know I wouldn't.
Every major software company I know of has been pirated like crazy and yet they still seem to be profitable. I wonder how they all do it? Are there any of the really huge companies that did not in fact practically encourage piracy in the beginning? Let's see Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk... How could they possibly have been so stupid. If they had just talked to you they could have simply used ironclad DRM and they would be rich by now. Rich! Last time I checked the CEOs of those companies are still eating out of garbage cans. If only they had used stronger DRM.
I would answer this guys question with a question. Let's say you can make $250,000 per year and feel secure in knowing that you have created one of the world's first truly uncrackable DRM systems and that not a single person on the whole planet is using it without paying for it. Or you can make $400,000 the first year, $600,000 the second year, and $800,000 the third year, but you have to go through life knowing that millions of people are using your software for free. I know which one I would choose. I'd do things the Microsoft/Adobe/Autodesk way. I'd rather someone buy my software of course, but if they are going to pirate someone's software I'd want it to be mine.
But money is not everything. I know that to some people that feeling of people not using their software without paying is better than having hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank. And for those people draconian DRM really is the right choice. Sure they will lose a good number of potential customers to competitors with less draconian DRM schemes, but they don't get that euphoric feeling of beating the crackers and thwarting all the would be free riders who have to resort to using and learning someone else's software that does pretty much the same thing as yours, but without the annoying DRM.
You mean try to actually contact the downloader personally? That's an interesting idea but how would you implement that? All you'd have is an IP address. I guess you'd have to get contact information from the ISP. It would put a new twist on guiltware if you were contacted personally by the developer asking you why you were downloading it. Of course lots of times it may be an innocent reason like getting a fully functional demo but the devs are never gonna believe that.
If dongles work so well then why is it that most of the popular software that uses a dongle has been cracked? For unpopular software lots of stuff hasn't been cracked even without a dongle or complex DRM. I'd like to see some success stories with popular software I'm familiar with. Obviously if crackers haven't tried to crack that is not a success story. That's security through obscurity. I'm referring to cases where a dongle was used and crackers attempted to crack it but gave up. One advantage of software is that it is not a physical item which is subject to the laws of entropy. All physical items will break eventually, but a series of zeros and ones can last forever. So you are reducing the value of your product by making it into something physical which will only survive for some limited period of time.
I find it amusing when you talk about an "incredibly short period of time". You mean like a clock cycle? Pretty much all blocks of time in the software world are incredibly short. That has nothing to do with how difficult the code is to reverse engineer. The problem with doing so much processing on the dongle itself is speed. That solution is only practical for software that is not resource intensive. It does sound like one of the better options though. Certainly better than requiring an internet connection all the time. If there are speed problems interfacing with the USB dongle, there are much worse bottlenecks relying on the quality of someone's internet connection. It also saves you from needing to keep your servers up and available for the next several thousand years. Of course you better be selling a unique product if you do this because otherwise people will just use a competing product that doesn't have annoying USB dongles to be lost/destroyed or which just fail on their own over time.
I think the answer to the original question depends on which is more important to you: getting more paying customers or stopping unauthorized users. Some developers would rather make less money but feel the security of knowing that not a single person will use their software without paying. Others just want to make as much money as possible from their work and don't care about free riders. Two different philosophies. To me neither is right or wrong.
I think you stumbled upon one problem I have found with demo versions that unintentionally encourages piracy. If you disable the versions too much, like your 3 minute limit example, people will just go to TPB to get a fully functional trial version. Or, if the software is sufficiently obscure that TPB doesn't have a crack then you might try to crack it yourself if you have the skill. I would say that at least half the demo software I download is too disabled to give you any real sense of how the software compares to its competitors. If no crack is available I just end up using and in some cases buying software from the competition. I'm not going to buy software that I can't test properly first.
So the first step is this : always-on Internet connection. There's is no issue here: we're living in a connected world and virtually all your users are already always connected.
The part about "living in a connected world" is pure fantasy. A couple of years ago I lived within 10 miles of a capital city and there was no home internet available at all. Not even dial up. I lived there for about 9 months. I survived by going to internet cafes when I needed to communicate with the intertubes. This was not in the US, but there are plenty of places in the US with only local dial-up or only long distance dial-up.
You will never hear from all the potential customers that you didn't get because they were turned off by the always connected requirement. What if you go out of business? Will you keep your servers going forever? Because forever is what companies without always on DRM are selling.
Yes, but it would demonstrate that the developer has a sense of humor, but is also a dick.
As long as it has to communicate data across the internet for more than just key checking purposes it will be slow. Even if your performance hit is "minimized" your software will still seem sluggish compared to your competitors. So in order to stop the pirates you've just reduced the value of your software to your potential customers. On the plus side the more sluggish your software gets the fewer people will use it and the less likely anyone will bother to crack it. So that would really be a two pronged attack on piracy. For applications like word processors it might work though and because hardly anyone would want to use an always connected word processor you'd have the additional benefit of keeping a low profile. Security through obscurity. But it least it might work, unlike most DRM schemes.
If you go that route it means you can't have a demo version available. Or rather, you can but risk putting off a genuine buyer by being a dick and accusing them of being a pirate when they are just legitimately trying out the software to compare it against your competitors. That's a great way to lose customers *and* encourage them to download the TPB version just to spite you.
I've never understood software companies that expect you to buy their product without testing it first. That would be like buying a car without driving it first. Or even seeing it.
I think Pro Tools does something like this. Or used to. I see that Avid bought them now. I think trying to integrate your software with real hardware is not a bad idea from a piracy standpoint if you can get away with it. I just checked on demonoid (TPB is down for some reason) and there are no versions of Pro Tools 10 available. There is one cracked or partially cracked version of Pro Tools 9 for OSX however.
Whatever function you put on the dongle can be read and copied to a binary file on your hard drive. Or the nature of the functions can be worked out from the surrounding code.
You mean you literally went to a store and shoplifted a copy of DOS 5.0? That is funny.
Are you saying that a team of programmers actually hand codes 35,000 different versions of code that actually performs essentially the same tasks? That is interesting. Can you give some examples of software that uses this system?
I've always thought it would be interesting to release a program where 90% of the code is actually DRM, all of it hand coded. It might take years or decades of coding, but you would have succeeded in the holy grail: uncrackable software. Or at least uncrackable in the time frames that any sane cracker would spend on it. Of course, if you spend most of your CPU time executing DRM code instead of application code any competitors you had would have a distinct speed advantage, but I guess the point of the exercise would just be to prove that it could be done, given enough time and money and effort.
Have you ever done any video editing? You do realize that video editing is resource intensive? If you tried to run the software from a remote server it would be an absolute performance nightmare. You'd be famous for creating the slowest video editing software known to man.
I agree, however, that remote execution is the only way to prevent your software from getting cracked. Essentially the program never leaves the company servers. Crackers can't crack what they don't have. Another "solution" is to release software that is so bad or that does something so useless that no one will bother to crack it. Or there is always security through obscurity. Don't tell anyone about the software. Keep it a secret. If people don't know about the existence of the software they can't crack it.
How would you prevent the cracker from uploading this data from the dongle to produce an emulator? All you'd have to do is copy the data into a binary file and modify the API so that it looks for the file on the SATA bus instead of on a USB drive. The cracker could even ask users to put the file on a USB stick if necessary. In order for your method to work you would first need a method to make binary data uncopyable.
That's an interesting idea, but what if one of your customers copies that code from the dongle and uploads it to the intertubes where cracker groups can just insert it back where it belongs. It might also slow down the program. For a word processor that might not be noticeable, but for something like video editing it probably would slow it down noticeably. Then you'd have the usual situation of even paying customers feeling pressure to download the noticeably faster version from TPB.