MS has spent a lot of time and effort addressing just this issue.  Windows
XP licensing takes into account 6 components of the user system and latches
on to that configuration.  It allows the user to change several components,
before it declares itself an illegal copy.

Whilst I dislike this method of doing things for PC software, it seems to
have worked quite well.  Perhaps something to emulate on a smaller scale.

However, I will echo some others' sentiment; I think you may piss off more
people than you think.


Denys...

-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of
Wirt Atmar
Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2002 9:48 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: OT: Two questions

For several different products we're in the process of developing, we need a
method of uniquely identifying PC's in the same way that we can identify
HP3000's via the HPSUSAN number for reasons of minimizing piracy.

We originally gave consideration to using the MAC address of the NIC card in
the PC but two considerations made that option less attractive. One is
minor:
there may be more than one real or pseudo NIC address in the PC and thus
there is some complexity determining which NIC is primary. However, the
second was more major: any NIC's MAC address can be changed by the user. The
"burnt-in" address remains the same after the change. The new aliased
addressed resides only in the registry, but after some substantial attempts
at trying to get the API's not to do this, the API's always read the
registry's MAC address in preference to the actual hardware address. We
simply don't want to turn off a user's license if they should change the MAC
address of their PC's NIC for some reason.

Secondly, we have given very serious consideration to reading the BIOS &
motherboard serial numbers/asset tags/product descriptions, but no Windows
API exists to this, in part because of the privacy issues that surfaced a
few
years ago. However, surprisingly a scripting mechanism now exists so that
any
remote user can read this information off of your PC. Remote Windows
management has become more important of late than privacy. While we could
make this mechanism work, the complexity level to do so is surprisingly
high.

Thus, we're now planning on using the serial number of the c:\ drive as the
unique identifying number of the PC. We can get that information quite
easily
and virtually instantly. Thus my questions are these: does anyone know if a
disc's S/N can be changed via software methods, or is it truly "burnt-in"?
This first question is driven by the second: when a single physical disc is
partitioned, the higher-level partitions (d:/, e:/, etc.) are all assigned
different serial numbers than that associated with the c:/ drive. The
partitions have s/n's that are just single-digit increments of one another,
but they are quite different than the base s/n of the disc. Does anyone have
any idea about the algorithm associated with those higher disc partitions?
Clearly, these partitions are being assigned arbitrary s/n's and those s/n's
are not residing in a read-only memory somewhere in the mechanism of the
disc.

The first question, can the base disc s/n be changed?, is the more important
of the two questions. If someone should re-partition their disc(s), I
presume
that the higher-level s/n's will change, but so long as the base s/n remains
the same, we're not going to screw the customer up by saying he's no longer
a
customer.

Wirt Atmar


Wirt Atmar

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