re how to the disks copy protected kuo sheng kasey chang kschang sfsuvax sfsu edu wrote the program is definitely backupable if restored to the same machine depends on the programmer don t use a disk drive characteristic if the user did an upgrade to the machine he she should reinstall all programs any way no document look up no disk wear and tear this is not a good idea i upgraded my motherboard last fall i would have been quite pissed at any software that would have forced me to reinstall simply because i changed motherboards any info in the bios is too volatile to use as a checksum are you going to require that a user re install all their software if they add mb of ram to their computer i did that a couple of weeks ago it s in the bios and if software had told me this isn t the machine you installed me on i would never have used that software again really bad idea i did not say that the originals would allow only one install the user s conscience should do that this is silly it s much easier to loan disks to a friend and let them do an install than to backup your copy already on disk and then give them that your scheme isn t going to stop anyone you know how many bytes you need to change in x wing to disable the quiz two yes two and don t ask me which ones they are do you know any assembly language at all all anyone needs to do if find the part of the code that does the quiz and insert a jmp instruction to just completely skip it not that difficult really and there is very little that commpanies can do to stop this type of thing using pklite or some similar utility would help but only if the resulting compressed exe were tagged as uncompressable what i believe the companies should do is implement the above plus a special patch once the user registers that loudly exclaims upon bootup registered to xxxxx address city state zip and disables the above this is by far the best idea you presented in your post making it plainly obvious who registered is going to stop casual pirates but the determined ones are just going to answer joe blow to the question of what s your name so this won t stop them in the long run pirates are always going to win this fight they simply have more time to work on the software and figure out the protection scheme steve madsen sjmadsen nextsrv cas muohio edu ask me about linux the free unix
