Re: Tolerant of plagiary?

[Darren Cook <darren@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>	Sorry to hear the story, but how could they get your codes?

I wondered about this. My guess, followed by some ideas for both sides:

1. Reverse-engineer Handtalk to get past the user-interface code.
2. Extract the rest of the code, and embed it in your program.
3. Have your program call the handtalk routines as if they were a black box.

You could detect this by comparing binary images of programs, for large
blocks that are identical.

The hacker could get round this by encrypting the embedded code. It then
gets unencrypted and stored in memory when the program is ran. So you'd
also need to have a look at the in-memory image of the program when it is
running. The clever hacker could maybe get round this as well.

So go programmers have to try and make their important code less
black-boxable. Some ideas:
  1.Have it always look for data files in a hard-coded path name (not good
for commercial programs; also hacker could alter that pathname).
  2.The same but using the windows registry.
  3.Have the user-interface code make a temporary file somewhere, that the
playing code then looks for. The playing code also makes the temp files for
later code to look for. This makes the two harder to split apart, and the
appearance of these temp files reveal which program is running. But it also
makes the program slightly slower.
  4.Use a hardware key - these are sometimes used to stop illegal copying
of expensive software.

I'm sure a hacker could get round all of these, though it would mean he'd
have to edit the playing code. Any more suggestions?

Darren