Sir, you’re selling licensing solution and I understand your frustration over the competition products, from our exeprience with PELock it protects against cracking or at least stops those attempts and it works, it works in real life conditions.
I know many stories from fellow programmers about their software cracked in no time (including my friend who used YOUR LimeLM system!).
You are right, there’s no thing as uncrackable protection, but your misinterpretation of the PELock’s page headers is just wrong and harmful. If any protection will help me to delay or discourage crackers from trying to crack our software - I’ll be more than happy to pay for it!
Your solution doesn’t even try to stop it. You don’t even try to hide this fact. Even your own customers says LimeLM doesn’t protect from cracks! By reading your articles I have doubts you have any decent knowledge about software protection and how it works on the battlefield.
You are selling a lie in a nice package and you try to convince everyone else your solution is the correct one and anything else is flawed. Well you know what? You’re simply wrong. There are better solutions that try to address some important issues, they might be not perfect, not uncrackable, but it just works. Even if you don’t agree with it.
And there’s no reason to argue with a person who thinks there’s no point in software protection just because everything can be cracked.
Well, I suppose that if you are so successful and rich as you are implying you are thanks to your obviously superior software protection PELock my only question is: why do you waste your time in online forums? At least I do drive a fancy BMW and enjoy 8 weeks of vacation every year. And I spend it flying around expensive planes. Well, the reason why I BOTHER to reply here is because thanks to Wyatt I am not driving a Chrysler.
We cannot use PELock (like probably a lot of companies with software products) because it is Windows only. Our market is 50% Mac. Probably you missed that detail. Oh, and it also does Linux. Wyatt delivers what he promises. A reliable software solution that can be used to reduce / limit casual piracy on essentially any platform. Let me do the math for you: we use PELock - we lose 50% of our market. Will we double our Windows sales because PELock is so much better than LimeLM? No. Why? Well, because as mentioned earlier, the biggest problem are currently filesharers for “cracked” software - and those can be taken down quite effectively. Unless you turn the executable file in a mess - in essence every software can be cracked because its machine code. And to be quite honest: I don’t want to deal with all these antivirus programs blocking this mess. We have enough funny surprises with legit libraries (e.g. Qt). I would guess that 50% of our potential Windows customers could not run the file because their antivirus blocks it. Ah, funny story, the owner of PELock actually admits this:
"Brian – me and my friends who develops software protection technologies (aka exe-protectors, exe-packers, code virtualizers, license key systems) are innocent victims of those antivirus engines who tags anything suspicious as a potential virus (false positive detection).
Software like PELock, Themida, VMprotect, Armadillo, Obsidium are used to protect legit software products against cracks, patches, keygens and all kind of nasty stuff from the hands of crackers.
But when someone wants to use our products they usually find themselves in troubles because of the low quality antivirus products who tags protected software as a virus.
I have lost many customers because they wouldn’t accept this to happen to their final products (imagine someone downloads their software and antivirus warning pops up – it’s a disaster for software maker), and there are so many antivirus products on the market it’s virtually impossible to cooperate even with a small number of their developers (I don’t even have to tell you it’s hard or even impossible to reach them and work out some solution)."
(http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/05/antivirus-is-dead-long-live-antivirus/)
Well, guess what. If we used PELock, we would have shit our pants many years ago because of random crazy users sh*** about antivirus warnings in forums. You can’t use it in a mass market and the founder admits it.
Wyatt is probably the ONLY one who does not claim what you say. He doesn’t say he has the only solution. He doesn’t say his solution is the best. He is simply honest. He has a great product. A good friend works for a very large company selling software products that bill hundreds of k USD per license (you know, the kind that makes nuclear powerplants work) and has been working on software protection for over a decade. He said the same thing. “Every mechanism a human invents can be circumvented by humans. There is no perfect protection”. And last but not least: We are selling a product that has to run fast and efficient. High CPU/GPU usage. LimeLM really is slick and lean. And it does not get killed by security software.
It’s remarkable that Wyatt still puts so much effort into replying to trolls trowing around with whatever accusations. I wouldn’t. I doubt you are actually selling anything close to what you are stating. Otherwise you would have run into these issues.
Obfuscate your code to prevent ‘easy’ stealing of your IP. (everything can be reverse engineered in the end)
Implement some sort of licensing.
Then, to reduce the ease of someone creating a crack for ALL versions of your product:
Check for valid license in multiple places in your code.
Change the name and signature of your license checking function with each release.
Change the location of checks in each release - do this by adding placeholders (maybe special comments eg /* LICENSE_CHECK_LOCATION */) where license checks CAN be added.
Create a pre-build process that modifies your source-code files by randomly selecting a sub-set of these locations and replacing the placeholders with a call to the license check function.
The steps above will make it fairly difficult (not impossible) for someone to create a crack for all versions of your product. Due to the different check locations and the license checking function name and signature changing with every release, any crack will only apply to a specific version. So then, you just need to release new versions more frequently.
Limit casual piracy with no protection? Sounds like a snake oil :). You have missed a really important point - LimeLM is not a software proteciton at all, so why argue about software protection, when all you want to do is to be able to use easy licensing features?
My friend got f****d up by LimeLM licensing feature the day he released his software, the next day to be honest (a cracked version popped up). Well - reality isn’t what Wyatt thinks it is and your ignorance is really interesting to me, because it seems you don’t care about cracked copies of your software, just a fancy way to activate it AGAIN THIS ISN’T SOFTWARE PROTECTION
Gareth let’s wait for the Wyatt tirade about how obfuscation is ineffective (he wrote about it), so we all just STFU and use his software without any reason at all hehe
Get a code-signing certificate and sign your code. If it is tampered with then everybody will know. Make a point of telling everybody that if the code isn’t signed (show them how to check) then it has been hacked, they are vulnerable to malware (hackers are bad, m’kaaaaay) and they bear that risk alone. This risk-aversion will work better in B2B than B2C because the freetards are overrepresented in “C” and so understand / care less about the malware risk.
It also helps to understand the difference between licensing and crack-protection - one makes being honest the most-painless workflow, the other is the war against drugs.
Sorry, Marc, but I think you have very little idea what you are talking about.
Your friends software got cracked because the license check verification in machine code of the executable was replaced. It’s not LimeLMs fault. EVERY license protection has this problem - unless you mix up the code and then get flagged by Antivirus.
ALL those issues you mention in the forum are either customers’ faults or have been resolved.
Nobody else had this problem, other users immediately tested and could not confirm.[quote=“MarcWells, post:27, topic:1745”]
Customers can’t connect to verify the license (Australia / New Zealand)
[/quote]
Has been resolved with 3.4.7
Well, Hyper-VM in Windows IS a virtual machine by definition, so you have to allow them…
For the 4 years we have been using LimeLM, the servers have been down for maybe 3 hours. TWO customers had a problem. TWO.
Never really experienced that.
PELock doesn’t even support Linux… So why complain?
You are a troll, Marc. And honestly I think you are not fully disclosing who you are. [quote=“MarcWells, post:27, topic:1745”]
it doesn’t protect anything from cracking - it’s just a licensing solution
it’s not compatible with latest Windows 10 operating system
it’s buggy as hell from the forum entries
its network is DDoSed on a regular basis and the entire thing is down for EVERYONE
poor SDK, it doesn’t even support Delphi
[/quote]
LimeLM protects from casual piracy. It does that very well. Casual piracy - as I and Wyatt pointed out - is that a license key cannot be used beyond the number of legit activations. EVERY software can be cracked if the machine code of the executable is manipulated. Obsfurcating and bullshittig whatever the machine code is not possible in real life because antivirus solutions F** y** ** It is compatible with Win 10 and the latest Win 10 update, it is not buggy as hell - but in real life, software licensing is f***** complex. It is not correct that regular DDoS attacks cause problems. There has been one incident in my four years of using it - and it has been resolved through CloudFlare. SDK is not poor - although I don’t know how well Delphi is supported.
Since you are such a m***** about other people’s products, let me be one as well:
PELock cannot be used in mass markets because it is blocked by antivirus
PELock works for Windows only and is useless for Mac and Linux
In theory, PELock MAY appear like a great solution, but it simply doesn’t work in real life. Let me quote the founder of PELock again:
Marc, I think it is funny, that you ONLY comment about this very one topic. It seems like you signed up for this forum only to badmouth Wyatt. You have lost all credibility.
In my experience:
I am not sure how obfuscating helps - maybe for NET compiled software which can be easily reverse engineered. But in practice, reverse engineering of executables is essentially impossible. Obfuscation can cause problems with antivirus software actually. So a lot of credible people I know actually recommend not to do.
Checking valid licenses in multiple places doesn’t really realistically solve the problem in our experience. Machine code calls stay very similar, rather not so hard for the crackers
Name and signature of license: I do not know what you mean by that. Does help (aka crackers need a new crack), but for popular software it happens very quickly. It is not so easy for an executable to check whether it has been tampered (e.g. whether its certificate is valid). For my understanding its impossible.
Change location of checks: yes, makes life a little bit harder for crackers, but like I said, for popular software it doesn’t help.
I don’t know how this random location selection would work - but I think that many of the suggestions here come at cost for testing and usability. You don’t want your legit customers run into issues, and I do not know how randomizing the process makes testing etc. easier and reliable.
Actually, we had people sending us screenshots of the cracked version complaining that Windows detected a tampered code signing certificate calling US out for it. And they sent it from their corporate accounts. We started going after the filesharers and that really reduced the cracking problem by 70% or so. Which is enough for us. Code signing certificates help quite a bit with antivirus false positives - but not always… Funny enough those cracks are usually infected by spyware. But people are cheap and often don’t care. People will never be fully honest with software.
You are a troll. You only signed up in this forum to spread FALSE rumours about Wyatt. Actually, you probably committed a crime depending on where you live - placing false information to financially harm somebody is called defamation. But I guess in Russia they don’t care so much about that
Yeah, now it’s 8 am here in Southern France. Just getting up to do some flying and enjoying my vacation Big Wyatt fan.
Btw: how can I dynamically create and revoke licenses and integrate PELock into my shopping system? With LimeLM and Fastspring it literally took me 3h to have everything up and running. Dynamic key generation with different license models. Who else can do THAT?
Listen, Wyatt’s fanboy - just because you love this guy, doesn’t automatically make his product great. Look at this thread from the very top, he did make the accusations and I just can’t agree with it, because our approach is working for us good, we are free from cracks, keygens, serials. We stopped piracy with Armadillo too in the past, it’s not just PELock.
Most of my developer friends actually care about their software NOT BEING CRACKED, PATCHED OR KEYGENNED, and they don’t care what means are neccessarry to achieve that - if it’s an exe protection, virtualization, just long as it resists cracking attempts or delays them.
Now - I write here about our experiences and our approach that works for us for many years and people like Wyatt and his fanboys are trying to convince me that we are doing it all wrong. How we are doing it all wrong, if it just works?
Listen buddy, a software protection that is blocked by every second antivirus on the planet doesn’t help us on Windows. Maybe it’s no issue for you, but in most major developed markets, it is.
PELock is not helping us out on Mac or Linux. So it’s virtually useless for us.
And its funny that every time I prove you wrong you come up with some other accusations. Why don’t you address all the problems I pointed out instead? Proof me wrong, not Wyatt.
My points are
Gets blocked by antivirus
Doesn’t work for Mac or Linux
Maybe you can help me better understand:
How can I revoke licenses in PELock (credit card fraud does happen, as do cancelled orders)?
Are licenses hardware locked? Or can a user use the license key as often as he wants (which is exactly what Wyatt addresses and that is more important to us than cracks - people are more likely to share a license key than to download a crack)
Is there an activation server? Can I manage my licenses online?
How are Virtual Machines handled in PELock?
What about offline/online activations, trials and trial extensions?
I didn’t find these answers on the webpage directly. Maybe you can help me answer them.
By reading your articles I have doubts you have any decent knowledge about software protection and how it works on the battlefield.
AGAIN THIS ISN’T SOFTWARE PROTECTION
