At 3:33 PM -0400 3/30/07, <tg-php@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ah ok.. that makes a bit more sense. Even still.. anyone who's
going out of their way to program a bot to defeat your specific
CAPTCHA mechanism will probably notice the failure in testing.
Unless you made a failure behave similar to a success but put them
in a situation where ultimately they still can't post messages or
access anything useful.
I remember reading about either 3D Studio or Maya (one of the 3D
modeling programs) and their copy protection method. They, at one
point, made I guess an obvious segment of code for the software
pirates to 'crack' that appeared to have totally deprotected the
program. It turns out that it only sort of de-protected it. They
put in multiple mechanisms that were more subtle. The one I'm
thinking of apparently made it so that after 250 right mouse clicks,
it would render everything in lower and lower qualities of
rendering. Or not render at all. OR menus stopped working or
something. But it was something that wasn't obvious at all until
people really started using the pirated copy for a while.
Tricky bastards. I love it. hah
-TG
Yeah, me too!
In one of my applications, I put in a self-check for size. If anyone
change a single byte, the program crashed.
In the old Apple days, I knew one developer who wrote a program that
when it thought is was being altered initialized it's floppy -- it
bit harsh I think. :-)
I wrote one that when altered would continue working, but gave the
wrong results. I was amused when people would contact me and complain
about their pirated copy not working properly.
I wrote one, didn't mass release it, but if it detected alteration,
it would send me an email telling me where it was and other specifics
about the user. I thought that was kind of neat, but it violated
privacy issues I wasn't comfortable with. However, I could have init
their hard-drive if I had wanted. I wonder what affect that technique
would have on pirating software.
Oh well, enough off-topic chatter.
Thanks for all the review and comments.
Cheers,
tedd
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