Re: Copy protection of the floppies

[Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@verizon.net>]

On Tuesday 25 November 2003 13:37, Nick wrote:
>Hardware dongles.  You need to be a bit creative but it can be done.
>  Say on save of the file output it to the hardware dongle with
> encrypts it with your private key, then on load of the file it gets
> decrypted with the public key, which is available, or some similar
> scheme.
>	Nick

This "thread" has finally pulled my trigger, rant mode on.

Fugedaboutit.  The last piece of dongle protected software I tangled 
with was an A-B Roll video editor for the amiga.  The life of the 
parallel port dongle was about 9 months because they damaged the 
chips in it so badly in grinding off the identifications.

When the 3rd dongle died, and we found the outfit had been sold to 
somebody else, and it was discovered they didn't have any more 
dongles, and furthermore they weren't even sure we had rights to the 
fscking software!  We screwed around with them for about 6 months and 
I finally gave them the choice of seeing us in court or finding a 
dongle.  They got in the car and drove something like 400 miles one 
way to get the last dongle in existance off the authors home machine 
and sent it to us overnight.  They must have finally gotten the 
message that we were at the breaking point of being pissed and 
somebody was gonna bleed.

Frankly, we felt as if we had the right to make somebody bleed, color 
(red or green) optional since the software was part of a $25,000 
dollar video editing package (that wasn't the video tape recorders, 
just the software and networking hardware, we had another $50,000 in 
broadcast quality VCR's in that system) that we had paid around $2000 
just for updates of since we'ed bought it 2 years before this little 
rodeo started.

In the meantime we finally made good on our threat to send it out to 
the hackers (we told them that was one of our options and I think 
thats what got them to put the key in the switch and drive), and had 
a clean, no dongle required, version of it back in about 36 hours.  
And believe it or not, there is honor among the hackers who broke 
that for us, no copy was ever released into the wild.  And they did 
it just to prove they could, no charge folks!  Sometime later yet, 
they (RVS) wanted a copy of the one we had broken.  I left it to 
TPTB, but I think they were told to go pound sand just for being the 
ass-holes they had proved themselves to be.

Do you want to put your 'clients' thru that?  I think not if you want 
to sleep well at night.

We, as users, are normally pretty honest.  We screwed around with 
those jokers at RVS for 6 months before we did what we had to do, and 
I think that was 5 months and 23 days too long considering it was the 
production heart of a television station at the time.  That lack of a 
dongle for 6 months cost us about $125,000 in lost production 
revenues because our main editing suite was down.

It boils down to trusting your clients.  Most of us, if we need your 
software to do something that cannot be done any other way, will be 
glad to honor your rights to that software as long as it is actively 
supported even if its do almost nothing updates just to keep the cash 
cow coming fresh.  We fully understand that one needs a 'stream' of 
revenue for long term support.

OTOH, if the support goes away because you who originally asked the 
question no longer have a quarter to call somebody who cares, and its 
still the only thing that does that job, and your so-called 
protection methods get in the way, then you can fully expect that 
they will be rendered null and void.  Call it piracy, whatever, 
welcome to how the real world works. class 101.

Bottom line is treat us right, we'll treat you right.

End of rant...

[...]

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz  512M
99.27% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.