License question fpodbc 1.0.15

[Fairlight]

The honourable and venerable Jay Ashworth spoke thus:
> On Tue, May 06, 2008 at 08:47:16AM -0400, Walter Vaughan wrote:
> >    When you formatted the drive array for NTFS you created the serial number.
> >    Its has nothing to do with the underlying type or number of drives.
> 
> Oh, you mean that they ask for the "Hard Drive serial number", but
> actually want the "Filesystem serial number"?
> 
> Naw; c'mon; fpTech *couldn't* make a terminology mistake like *that*...

What's better is being told what they actually base it on, then seeing
things like this after 30 seconds with Google:

http://www.bluechillies.com/details/45520.html
http://www.partition-manager.com/help/change_serial_number_of_a_partition.htm
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/change_drive_sn.aspx
http://www.driverforum.com/harddrive/1116.html

How well-conceived was that "protection" again, exactly?

And before there's a knee-jerk that takes things back to MAC address
bindings, those are not immutable either.  I know there's a good deal of
hardware out there with programmable MAC addresses--some you can even set
from remote.

So 5.6 was held up who knows how long (I count about a year from what I was
told, maybe more) for a license manager that's based on something you can
apparently bypass for free, or maybe $10?  Colour me dumbfounded.  That's
-almost- as bad as the scheme I saw that relied on the string in argv[0] (I
kid you not, I've seen it done...demo mode for anything but the right name,
the "right name" that made it the full version was the name of the help
file, which was the same in both distributions...it was a macro program
some years back).

*rolls eyes* People should give it up already.  Every single last
protection method that's ever been devised has been cracked, and usually in
short order.  It's a merry-go-round that never ends.  From the old Apple
and Commodore days, to SecuROM and friends, straight through to the latest
versions of ArCCoS that Sony keeps revising in the idiotic hope it will
stem the tide of DVD copying--they've all been cracked.  All worthless, and
a waste of R&D budget funding.

If it's not server-dependant (ie., an MMO or something that -must- call
home to be USED -every time-, not just at install like Adobe's latest CS3
suites), it's not protectable.  Period, end of story.  People just don't
get the idea, I guess.  I'd say, "Their [the developers'] loss," but it's
actually the loss of the consumers paying for that R&D and implementation.
Which is really tragic.

mark->
-- 
"Moral cowardice will surely be written as the cause on the death
certificate of what used to be Western Civilization." --James P. Hogan