Quote:
Originally Posted by Duggan
Maybe the check could be done on a less comprehensive level, such as by drive serial number? That way, someone who keeps reinstalling their OS won't have an issue because when the check is made, it's against the same drive they were on before?
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Hah! We spent *many* weeks striving to achieve that goal. But Microsoft is a *joke* in this department. Across the various different versions of Windows, this was handled radically differently on each one and was riddled with bugs on each one. So much so that it was impossible to even achieve 80% reliability.
For example, we couldn't get stuff to work on one version of Windows. So we spent days going around and around with Microsoft, finally being allowed to talk to the actual development staff. It turns out that there was a big comment inside the Microsoft source code saying something akin to "Don't forget to implement this". Guess what? The code was missing and nothing had been implemented.
After banging our heads against that approach for weeks, we finally gave up trying to make it work.
And that approach still failed to account for situations where you have a RAID array and the drive serial numbers are not accessible.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Duggan
You could probably even do it as some kind of CRC check per license so that Lone Wolf isn't accused of "storing identifying information on individual computers".
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That's how we currently do it. We collect details of the user's system and generate a "system code" based on it. This is essentially a CRC, so that none of the user's identifying information can ever be reversed from it.