26 Nov
2001
26 Nov
'01
7:39 p.m.
Geoff Roberts wrote:
Or you can run a little app that correctly creates
what
appears to be a
valid installed license for what particular products you wish to run,
including the version, number of license units etc.
Never seen this done, never even heard of such an app before.
I know that at least two groups (or people) managed
to reverse engineer licence PAKs. One was even stopped
by DEC through legal action (IIRC).
They would still work with this particular method.
Just as a matter of interest, which apps?
One of the 3rd party TCP/IP apps was reputed to do this -
possibly Multinet. It's easy enough to check since
there is a logical you can set which causes all
licence requests to be displayed on the operator
console.
Personally, I firmly believe that all such license
enforcement systems are a
waste of time, since ultimately they can all be circumvented.
It's just a
question of how bad you want to do it...
To be fair it was never touted as an enforcement
method. It was only there as a minor hurdle or tripwire
to warn you that you were not allowed to run
some software or to limit your usage of said
software. This meant that you had to take
deliberate steps to get past the LMF.
Presumably a defence of "I didn't realise"
would have been somewhat harder to use in court!
Antonio