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Originally Posted by ctitanic
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So far, your words donīt seem to me of any help neither to this community either developers to find a better solution than what Anton have done.
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My words won't be all that helpful, but I suppose I wanted to try and point out why I am not liking this whole hard reset thing.
Just my 2 cents, for I like to chime in every now and again. I have a ton of respect for Tweaks2k2 (yay contest prizes!! :)). Yet, I have a feeling on the hard reset feature...
Hypothetical situation... say the registration algorythm is broken... the person who figured this out could either release a program that would generate keys, or just sprinkle keys here and there as older ones are blacklisted. The second measure would be harder to detect... we will call this situation A.
Hypothetical situation... somebody tries to fish for the information by spaming people stating that, in order to continue to recieve updates to said program, you need to send your registration key to this person, in a reply e-mail... then you'll still have updates... situation B.
In either situation, the user is not having any issues, until the next program update. They update, and they have a hard reset instantly. The pirates in this case didn't really get harmed, because they know what keys work in which versions and they know not to update. The end user on the other hand (aka, the person who PAYS money) got really hurt, and they most likely won't recieve a warm reception at technical support.
Both situations, thankfully, are still hypothetical. However, with the added incentive of this hard reseting, there may be some users who would not only want to harm the developer by providing illegal keys, but also harm the developer by discovering keys that are currently in use, effectively causing the whole userbase to start hard resetting.... this isn't just a customer support issue anymore, this is a MAJOR black mark on the developer, and this most likely will cause some slight economic problems with future sales of that program.
In other words, hard resetting isn't the silver bullet to solve all piracy problems. In fact, not only is there going to be a public backlash, but there is now also a nice convient "virus" on all devices... a virus that does nothing until someday, somebody manages to start blacklisting keys that are in use... there is the payload... and the harm is done.
Situation A, a key generator like sitatuion, seemed like the reason why Tweaks2k2 has a new key algorythm. So, in a way, this could happen to any program that has a hard reset feature. How many blocked keys are required before it is considered to be too many? How many hard resets does it take before another measure is taken (such as a new algorythm)? Who looses in the meantime? Those hard questions are the basis of many complaints.
Despite the temptation to harm pirates, the fact that end users could be harmed too is the major problem here, and thus the main reason why I'm against it. However, I haven't developed any pocket pc programs before, so I can't say I can see it from your point of view. I, however, was always uneasy with the whole key idea (being that somebody could possibly use their math skills and then make it seem like I gave out my key, instead of them generating it!), and adding in a hard reset risk might make me stay away from even the best software.
Some people go through any measures to pirate software. The developer shouldn't lower themselves to the priates level and therefore do anything, even tremendously harm their user base, to try and strike back.
Just my 2 cents. I value everybody's opinion, and I enjoy reading about this issue as it unfolds.
(sorry if my post seems a little out of sync with the conversation, but it takes me a while to type, and I didn't read any posts on the 2nd page! :) I still feel my post is mostly revelent)