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Ron,
> If I understand your concept, it relies on a registration number
> that could be traced back to the original purchaser.
Ok - I will be more obvious - although this will decrease the
substantial consultancy fee which I expect from
Omega for my ideas:
The tracing back is one aspect. Another aspect is the way how the
protection normally works: Either the program works
or it doesn't. Either way you know whether your code is ok or not.
Now, I suppose that the people who are using tradestation must rely
100% on the accuracy of the software. Otherwise there is no point
using TS. And now imagine that Omega would sell you TS5 with disks
and a code which they just tell you on the phone. But when you
actually use a wrong code to get into the programm it won't tell you.
It will just perform a few calculations wrongly when you do your
studies. Wrongly in a very subtle way and only at random times. This
would make it very hard to back-trace a mistake and to verify
whether the code is right or wrong. If TS would be some
wordprocessor you couldn't care less but .......
So if there are really so many software pirates out there then
without any doubt they will very happily sell or give to you software
with fake codes because it would be very hard for you to find out
whether the software works or not or whether you DRAM just had some
hick-up. - In any case you could hardly claim your money back and
they would feel happy because they just legged over another crook..
Omega could even put copies on their FTP server for downloading (evaluation).
So, who in his right mind would buy such a software from anyone else
other than Omega because they would be the only ones who could verify the
code. This way they could even control the second-hand market.
The snag with the personalized software is that it would allow Omega
to trace the software back when someone tries to verify his code and
to generate a verification mechanism which is hard to break.
As everyone knows: Any software protection can be broken. But who
will use broken software if he doesn't know whether it is really
broken and his livelyhood depends on it ?
Gerrit Jacobsen
>Since the
> majority of people who attempt day-trading generally blow out long
> before having a chance to learn the ropes-- many copies of TS would
> be floating around and available to be purchased. Any one copy
> could be used to duplicate many copies of TS using cheaply
> reproduced CDs.
>
> It wouldn't be worth Omega's time to go after one offending party
> (unless maybe he was George Soros :) in attempt to recover damages
> from the pirated set of CDs. Any scheme that takes control of the
> software out of Omega's hands leaves them vulnerable to become a
> victim of piracy hackers and potentially could bring them down.
>
> In another scenario, someone could purchase a copy of TS under a
> bogus name directly from Omega-- clone it in Hong Kong the next day
> and the horse would be out of the barn for good.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> At 11:40 am 1/30/98 +0000, you wrote:
> >
> >Given the moderate number of TS sold it is possible to code a
> >personal authentication code of the client into the software.
> >Basically you would get one standard CD with the main part of the
> >software and a custom burnt CD or diskette with the rest of the
> >software and some authentication code cleverly hidden somewhere in
> >it. (Given the speed of todays computers such a dll or exe could be
> >compiled in no time and be transferred to disk.) This would allow
> >the user to copy his software for safety reasons and deter him from
> >selling the software illegally because it could be traced back.
> >
> >Gerrit Jacobsen
>
>
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