Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!ukma!xanth!nic.MR.NET!umn-cs!hall!rosenkra
From: rosenkra@hall.cray.com (Bill Rosenkranz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Piracy
Keywords: software piracy
Message-ID: <3555@hall.cray.com>
Date: 4 Jul 89 02:48:30 GMT
References: <223@marvin.moncam.co.uk> <3554@ferris.cray.com>
Reply-To: rosenkra@hall.UUCP (Bill Rosenkranz)
Organization: Cray Research, Inc., Mendota Heights, MN
Lines: 34


In article <223@marvin.moncam.co.uk> emmo@moncam.co.uk (Dave Emmerson) writes:
=*The only lasting solution otherwise lies with the hardware
=*people. One *crude* and probably non-workable example is..
=*each machine has a scrambler in its databus/floppy drive path
=*and an ID which represents the configuration used on that
=*particular machine. Software houses supply disks directly
=*to purchasers, suitably encrypted for his/her machine's ID
=...
=*Slightly less feasible is to put an ID in each ROM set, 
=*and write the disk driver to only accept ID=0 on disk (user's
=*own disks) or ID=disk ID. The bought software would then
=*either abort or cripple itself if the disk ID was 0

look: you are missing the point entirely. software by its very nature
cannot be protected. whether on ROM (you can easily disassemble the
ST ROM code), on disk, etc., if someone wants to crack it, it CAN be
done. you name a (reasonable) scheme and i can figure out a way to
break it. and if i can't SOMEONE can. doorlocks on cars and often
elaborate alarms are supposed to stop car theives. maybe they can
stop someone who only has 15 seconds to get in a car, but if they
have 5 minutes, believe me, the got the car...

(note the word reasonable above. by this i mean something that is
not such a pain in the posterior that the honest people buying it
are not severely put upon just to operate the s/w. if anything, it's
those people who developers should be catering to and not the thieves.
you are far better off devising a way to change human nature than
wasting your time devising inoperable schemes. by now, anyone in the
s/w biz should accept that piracy is an inescapable fact of life.)

-bill
rosenkra@boston.cray.com
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