Revolution Compatible Registration Tool

[Richard Gaskin]

Levi Kendall wrote:
>   I was just wondering what everyone out there was using for releasing
> commercial demo applications with Revolution.  What I'm thinking in
> terms of here is having a limited demo version that will show the user
> *some* of the functionality but which is "crippled" in some areas. 
> The user will be able to access some kind of registration feature
> (this is what I'm looking for) that would then unlock the product.  At
> this point I'm looking for any system to do this, perhaps it could be
> web integrated or be able to unlock with a serial code while offline,
> anything of the sort.
> 
>   Has anyone found a ready-made system to distribute like this with
> Revolution?  And perhaps one that can be used on the same
> cross-platform support which Revolution itself offers.  Any ideas?

If you're willing to spend a little time on it, it's not hard to do 
what's needed, which is to provide security only sufficient to dissuade 
casual pirates.

Serious pirates can cr at ck anything, and are not likely to ever be paying 
customers anyway, so you'll definitely find that beyond a certain level 
of effort there's a case of diminishing returns with software security.

This page is a very helpful resource:
<http://www.inner-smile.com/nocrack.phtml>

Not everything he writes there will be applicable to Rev, and some of it 
goes farther than I care to, but some of the things listed there are 
indeed very useful.

There are other resources too -- worth spending some time with Google to 
do a little reading before deciding on a scheme that's good for you.


Things I've learned from online anti-cr at ck resources:

- All software can be cr at cked.

- Most commercial products have been cr at cked.

- Those that haven't are usually just unpopular.

- The average time between release of a program and release
   of its cr at ck is under ten days.

- Game companies spend millions hiring the best minds in the
   business merely to try to extend the time-to-cr at ck to 180 days.

- The biggest material loss from cr at acking for many small shops
   is not lost sales (since very few who use stolen seri at ls
   would ever pay anyway) but bandwidth:  in the days following
   the post of a seri at l your server will get several thousand
   downloads from China, Russia, and Korea.

- About every two years the Ministry of Culture in China makes
   a broad proclamation about how internationally embarassing
   it is to be the #1 nation for piracy, and will start cracking
   down on that "immediately".  Every year they manage to shut
   down the exchange of porn and copies of Thomas Paine's
   "Common Sense" but have never accomplished a thing with
   regard to piracy.

- A growing number of developers protect themselves by banning
   whole ranges of IPs assigned to those countries (it would be
   ideal if these nations would merely enforce international law,
   but in the meantime developers do what the can to contain costs).

- In stark contrast to the effectiveness of the motion picture
   industry, the software industry is almost entirely inneffectual
   at protecting their businesses, apparently unable to negotiate
   the same sort of international law enforcement arrangements
   Hollywood does all the time.

- Games aside, most of those who download a stolen product will
   never actually use it (there's a weird hoarding thing that
   goes on where simply having it taking up space on their hard
   drive somehow feeds something in their lives).

- A great many stolen/cr at cked seri at ls are available in programs
   that are actually Trojan horses, spewing all manner of malware
   throughout the user's system.  Using these is often greater
   punishment than anything you could hope to do yourself. :)

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
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