Hi gurus, Pls can u help me 2 crack macromedia fireworks software&send me d hint thanks -Tbank
DoCo is getting indexed pretty well by google, is it? ;P
As for how warez and countermeasures affects software sales - gosh that's a big and complex debate, and it depends extremely much on your product, target market, competitors, et cetera. Personally I believe in making non-draconian licenses, and not over-doing the anti-piracy measures; a lot of the time, you end up penalizing the legitimate users while not being much of a burden for pirates. Put a few locks on to keep the honest people honest, but don't think you can ever win the battle - because you can't. Even übercomplex solutions which implement part of program functionality in hardware dongles, and do complex mathematical transformations of your program code into finite state machines, have been broken. The more interesting the task is (and of course the higher profile your product is), the more talented reverse engineers will be driven towards your product.
IMHO a really nice idea is using "
partially validated keys", where your app will accept a "range" of valid keys - later revisions can do more refined checks, or use a webservice/whatever at a later point, to do a
full key check (either using a full algorithm online, or verifying particular license through customer database lookup). The trick, then, is to let the user play around with his pirate copy and get "attached" to the program... then a few weeks later, throw up a nag screen every now and then telling the user that he's using a pirated copy, and that he might want to consider registering the application - but don't crashbomb the application, leave it fully working. For some products, that has given additional sales. Of course some crackers will also remove that part of the protection, but oh well.
You can't really do
anything to completely fend off crackers, until we're all running on heavily locked-down
Trusted Computing systems - and even then, there might be backdoors. But for now, even if you can generate per-user custom-built executables with code reorganizing and embedded watermarks, protection code in signed Windows drivers, encrypted code sections delivered by license-checking webservices, and parts running on custom hardware dongles... your system
will be broken - so don't overdo it
