piracy-prevention

Recently I did some web design work for a person. I continued to show him progress by giving him a link to his new site on my development server. Nearing the end of completion, he dropped all contact with me and I was completely unable to get a hold of him. I took a look at his site recently, and he mixed a combination of his old site, with the new one I was creating. I thought maybe he redesigned it himself after looking at my version, however a quick look at his source code shows that the parts I recognized were full out just copied by viewing the source code on my dev server. So he

I'm not interested in getting version information. All I want to do is to make sure my application will only run on a legal version of Windows and not on a pirated version. Windows uses some trick to determine this but still allows pirated versions to continue to run, although with some limits. So, is there a way to check if the application is installed on a legal, genuine Windows version? (Vista and better, at least.) Let me clear something up: Microsoft isn't preventing users to use a non-validated or illegal version of their operating system. Thus I don't have any reasons to block my

I plan to release one small, low priced utility. Since this is more hobby than business, I planned to use Dotfuscator Community Edition that is shipped with VS2008. How good is it? I could also use definition of "good enough obfuscator" - what features are missing from Dotfuscator Community Edition to make it good enough. Edit: I checked pricing on number of commercial obfuscators and they cost a lot. Is it worth it? Are commercial versions that much better protecting from reverse engineering? I'm not very afraid of my application being cracked (it will be disappointing if application is so

I am implementing a "locking" system in my app which protects my app against being copied and used illegally. The system checks the signature of a hardware-based code and expects it to be signed with a Private Key that only my company owns. (The app has got the Public Key to validate the signature.) I want to make sure that no one changes my locking mechanism in the app, so I want to sign my app's assembly and I think it makes sense. Since I haven't seen the CLR ever talk about an assembly's signature being invalid, I want to make sure this system really works. Does it? What should I do to

I've never implemented In App Purchase before, so I used the MKStoreKit wrapper and have a working implementation. MKStoreKit keeps all receipts in the UserDefaults .plist as a BOOL, thus it is very simple for pirates to distribute the in app purchases in a "cracked" state. Once the first purchase is made, the bundle can be distributed and the .plist can be recreated to enable IAP unlocks. I'd like to extend MKStoreKit to create the In App Purchase validation data in the iOS keychain. Is there any drawback or possible reason for this to fail for paying users, be unreliable, or any other reason

Currently I am hosting a Django app I developed myself for my clients, but I am now starting to look at selling it to people for them to host themselves. My question is this: How can I package up and sell a Django app, while protecting its code from pirating or theft? Distributing a bunch of .py files doesn't sound like a good idea as the people I sell it to too could just make copies of them and pass them on. I think for the purpose of this problem it would be safe to assume that everyone who buys this would be running the same (LAMP) setup. Don't try and obfuscate or encrypt the code - it

We are planning to develop a client server application using C# and MySQL. We plan to sell the product on the shelf like any other software utility. We are worried about the decompilation of our product which does have some sort of edge over our competitors in terms of usability and bundled functionality. How can we prevent our software from decompilation, so the business logic of the product remains intact? We have heard about Reflector and other decompilers which makes our code very much vulnerable for copying. Our customer base is not Corporates but medical practitioners who themselves may