The client does not want to use an activation server for a couple of
reasons. Most importantly, if it's not well executed and supported,
you get a lot of (legitimately) angry customers. Quark, Inc. had this
experience a number of years ago. Adobe seems to have done a much
better job of it with Creative Suite 2 and 3, but it's not a trivial
thing to do with high reliability.
I agree, Tom, about dropping this sort of thing these days, but the
client wants to explore this sort of strategy...
--pt
On Dec 30, 2007, at 12:58 PM, Tom Benson wrote:
> No, Mac OS X's firewall is in stealth mode by default.... if the
> packet can't get through you'll never know about it, and it's a great
> security feature..
>
> Auto Discovery classes are based on UDP, so they're out. I'd say the
> best way to do this would be to use a common port number, such as 80
> (web) and have a PHP/ASP/JS/whatever based authentication system,
> running at your end.
>
> Of course this relies on them having an internet connection, but 90%+
> of people are always on these days, just make sure you're letting them
> (the end user) know what you're doing, and encrypt the information
> being sent back and forth.
>
> For LAN users, if you get two registrations form the same IP, then two
> people on the same LAN are trying to use your app. If they have a site
> license, it's cool, if not, kill the second instance.
>
> I much prefer to simply trust my customers these days, the genuine
> one's appreciate it and come back for more, the one's who pirate it
> were never going to buy it in the first place, so no business lost as
> far as I am concerned.
>
> - Tom.
>
> On 31/12/2007, at 7:31 AM, Peter Truskier wrote:
>
>> I'd like to hear folks' thoughts about network "sniffing" strategies
>> for licensing/serial number enforcement. I will say that I'm not wild
>> about this approach in the first place, but a client has asked for
>> it.
>>
>> I have code that uses UDP sockets to multicast queries at critical
>> points in execution to see if other copies of the application with
>> the same serial number are running on the LAN, and if so whether the
>> total number exceeds the license limitations.
>>
>> The problem with this strategy is that firewalls can easily be set up
>> to block UDP connections. It seems that if a UDP socket is blocked on
>> Windows, I get an error 107 when I try to multicast. On Mac OS X,
>> however, when the "Block UDP Traffic" option is selected in the
>> firewall's "Advanced" section, the socket gets no error, but just
>> acts as though the multicast went out, or perhaps it's the return
>> message that's blocked silently. In any case, I don't seem to be able
>> to detect the block on Mac OS X.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Peter
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