Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!lll-winken!gauss.llnl.gov!casey
From: casey@gauss.llnl.gov (Casey Leedom)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Ye Old Discard Protocol (WKS == 9)
Message-ID: <40184@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Date: 1 Dec 89 23:58:12 GMT
References: <8911301910.AA03187@sneezy.lanl.gov> <40114@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Sender: usenet@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV
Reply-To: casey@gauss.llnl.gov (Casey Leedom)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lines: 27


  As an expansion and follow up of my mention of "multicast" is my last
note, I offer the following:

  I request that companies who currently use ``Broadcasted License
Numbers'' (BLN) as a product copy protection scheme, use a multicast
address instead of the broadcast address.

  The merits or demerits of doing license checking are somewhat
political.  The obnoxiousness of interrupting every other host on the
network regardless of manufacture just to check one manufacturer's
license is untenable and unjustifiable.

  I would suggest either registering a special multicast address for each
company's product or better yet, register a general ``License Multicast
Address'' (LMA) that all companies could use for such purposes.  That
would encourage all companies interested in doing BLN to do it with the
LMA.  The fact that all these companies' products would be interrupting
each other left and right can only be counted as a feature ...  Perhaps
the resulting slowness of such products would form a market force that
would select for products that concentrated their anti-copying efforts on
quality of product and service rather that algorithmic means.

  Perhaps we could even get this into the Host Requirements RFC as an
addendum ... :-)

Casey


Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com