Hidden spot on hard drives?

mdff nospam at mgedv.net
Tue Oct 11 01:46:10 PDT 2005


> the company where I work (with Windows) is evaluating a copy 
> protection
> product that stores info somewhere on the HDD where the user 
> cannot touch it,
> a format will not erase it, and Norton Ghost will not find it.
> 

a> if you invent such copy protection, be sure that it will get
broken sooner or later. it's always just a matter of time and
interest of someone.

b> if this is a business-product for usage on companies clients,
this thing has to be able to be backed up. no admin want's prods
in his LAN, where he can always re-install the whole box instead
of restoring an image (think about this for let's say 500 users)

c> if the harddisk fails, well... just read b.

as far as i experienced, private and illegal users will always
steal software, regardless of how good the protection was.
companies which need the software and work with it, will pay for
it sooner or later (if they really need this software, they will
pay support, too). and hundreds of hours of very expensive time
these days goes into "un-locking" and installing software with
stupid and annoying license-systems.
last weekend i was setting up a new cluster-system for a customer
running AIX with some application server software. this stupid
software needs keys for every node which makes it impossible to
install this software on a central SAN without having local copies
on all cluster-nodes. THIS is annoying. btw., for now, i figured
out how to crack this mechanism in 5 minutes. they have a real
big license-system, many operators, online-licensing pages, web-
and mail-systems setup for it, forms, fax-forms, etc...
guess how much this costs? the customer AND the software company
have to waste much time for this licensing stuff...
i was writing a license-number thing for a software of one of my
companies as well, and guess what? 5 days after releasing, there
was a working serial on crack-pages available (someone posted his
own serial). and now, no more keys 'cause it won't stop anyone...
br...
PS: no reply, im @questions...



More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list