Disclaimer – Simplified Logic respects intellectual property rights and in no way supports using hacked or cracked software. What follows is simply an educational exercise with the intent of highlighting the security dangers of releasing unprotected software in virtual machine environments such as the Adobe Flash Player.
It’s fairly common for me to see comments on blogs and forums playing down the security risk from decompiling software. They say things like “Source code isn’t intellectual property”, or “Nothing is 100% secure, so why bother with protection?”. While it’s true that in virtual machine environments NOTHING is 100% secure, there can be great value in taking some measures to protect your software. Many company’s approaches to software security are akin to the Jeff Foxworthy comedy bit about putting the house keys under the mat with a sign on the front door saying “The key is under the mat…” Your only hope is a blind burglar (listen at 20:25 into the clip).
The concept of a license pool is fairly unique to Nitro-LM. Â Each pool is attached to a company. Â A company can have as many different pools as you can define. Â It really depends on how complex you need to make your access restriction rules. Â Using the concept of pools, you can do some unique things like bundling software into suites. Â For example, if you had three software products, you could put 5 licenses in a pool and allow the customer to use those 5 licenses in any way they chose across the products. Â Need more developers using product A this week? Â No problem, just release the license from product B and use them in A. Â In a nutshell, a pool is a group of licenses along with all the rules for getting access to those licenses.
Rules are broken down into three categories: product associations, usage restrictions, and access restrictions.
Continue reading “Swimming to the bottom of License Pools” »
The Online Flex Meetup Group is Organized by John Mason out of Atlanta, GA. His group attracts attendees from all over the USA and the World. We received an Invitation to present to this group on June 10, 2009. The event was recorded and also covered some material that was also presented at the 360|Flex Conference in Indianapolis, IN in May 2009. Enjoy!
The Nitro-LM licensing system is very feature packed. For a new user, it can sometimes be a little bit daunting to get set up and running. I’ve put together a screencast showing some common tasks to complete when getting started in the Nitro-LM system. If you haven’t yet signed up for a FREE 100 license account for a year, go to the Installation/Support page and follow the instructions.
I recently had an opportunity to present Nitro-LM to the Atlanta flash user group on the topic of DRM and the Flash Platform. The slides are attached (you’ll have to rotate them in Adobe Reader, for some reason, sliderocket didn’t print them out right-side up) along with the recording of the webex meeting.
So this is one of the more interesting problems that Software Development Companies are faced with. While this should be obvious to anyone in business, it is amazing how few pay attention to it. Imaging how difficult it is to predict your revenue stream when you have customers that are NOT REQUIRED to pay in order to use your software. But why should they? Your own policies actually gave them permission to NOT pay you (e.g. via the grant of a “perpetual” license…) Here is a situation that ACTUALLY happened!
Simplified Logic and Andrew Westberg present Digital Rights Management and the Flash Platform
About This Meeting:
- Licensing basics (how our approach differs)
- Notifications & Messaging
- Reporting
- Encryption
Continue reading “Adobe User Group of Atlanta – March 2009” »
Ok this is more than a bit unusual. According to the support documentation at Apple, the latest version of iWork ’09 does not come with any serial numbers when purchased in store.
Hmmm… Why would Apple do this?
In designing the new interface for Nitro-LM Administrator, I’ve had the pleasure of designing the new Report Builder interface. In the current production version of this tool, we have a handful of reports that licensees and customers can use to see various aspects of usage data.
Continue reading “Report Builder – Combining Charts with Degrafa” »
We never thought we would ever see this in a licensed commercial software product, but here it is…