Re: spoofing the ethernet address (license managers)

[forrestc () IMACH COM (Forrest W. Christian)]

On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, Michael Wojcik wrote:

> Yes, people have proposed arcane, byzantine schemes like encrypting portions
> of the program, scattering license checks through it, etc.  Sooner or later,
> though, the software has to decide to trust something that's under the
> user's control.

This reminds me of the Apple II days, when all of the above were attempted
and some of them were somewhat successful, at least for a while.

I remember when the "holy grail" of deprotection was Microsoft Flight
Simulator - They used some funky obscure code which basically accessed the
disk in ways the designer never intended.   Nothing could copy it very
reliably as a result, and it was out for at least a year or so before
someone successfully figured out how to extract it onto an easily copyable
disk in a form that would work.

But the short version is that no matter the copy protection someone will
figure a way around it.

I fully agree with the rest the (trimmed) message that the real purpose of
licensing is to help keep those honest people honest.  I think people
should look at ways to help count software which needs to be
licensed.  For this, the mac-address based scheme might be useful, as it
does tend to provide a unique (at least in an enterprise) identifier for a
computer.

- Forrest W. Christian (forrestc () imach com) KD7EHZ
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