Not really-imho that is the topic...

Yes, it is. Now that you've confirmed a willingness to see this line of discussion pursued, I'll continue ...In the end piracy will never be conquered because today more and more people seem to lack consciences. Maybe it's due to preservatives in the food, or too much TV, or ... [fill in the blanks] ... .We see this in the random mass murders that are committed today. Where once upon a time people simply committed suicide, today they insist on taking 5-10-15 people with them, and on making the police kill them.There are no moral restraints anymore -- anything goes. This, of course, is exactly what brought Rome down -- decay from within. (It's what brings all empires down.)Have I stepped over the line yet?

Yes, it is. Now that you've confirmed a willingness to see this line of discussion pursued, I'll continue ...In the end piracy will never be conquered because today more and more people seem to lack consciences. Maybe it's due to preservatives in the food, or too much TV, or ... [fill in the blanks] ... .We see this in the random mass murders that are committed today. Where once upon a time people simply committed suicide, today they insist on taking 5-10-15 people with them, and on making the police kill them.There are no moral restraints anymore -- anything goes. This, of course, is exactly what brought Rome down -- decay from within. (It's what brings all empires down.)Have I stepped over the line yet?

Not for me Mike-but considering most today have not read Gibbon's decline and fall of the Roman Empire I am sure your point will be lost.

Yes, it is. Now that you've confirmed a willingness to see this line of discussion pursued, I'll continue ...In the end piracy will never be conquered because today more and more people seem to lack consciences. Maybe it's due to preservatives in the food, or too much TV, or ... [fill in the blanks] ... .We see this in the random mass murders that are committed today. Where once upon a time people simply committed suicide, today they insist on taking 5-10-15 people with them, and on making the police kill them.There are no moral restraints anymore -- anything goes. This, of course, is exactly what brought Rome down -- decay from within. (It's what brings all empires down.)Have I stepped over the line yet?

Ah nuts. Let's get back to piracy. We don't need to speculate about why, we just need to observe that some people have no sense of shame -- so that we need protection schemes to safeguard the interests of developers.At the same time, we don't want the protection schemes to spoil the customer experience. A balance needs to be struck, and given the current state of the art I find the Flight1 Wrapper to be that balance.

The F1 Wrapper System, which we've used from our inception, was chosen for that very reason.Imagine our surprise when we found that it was not as effective against theft as we had hoped.That is the primary reason I've floated the ideas as outlined... Perhaps FS Developers will begin to impliment supplemental protections along the lines of permanent disablement of hacked software.The techniques may actually prove to be the most effective yet. It remains to be seen if FS Developers become proactive.We've found no legal or moral imperative to deliver a usable product to a thief for distribution.Again, this has no effect on Legitimate Users as they do not hack their own software. If they did, they would no longer be Legitimate Users. :(

*EDIT*After careful thought I'm removing my own post here. No need to invited disruption into this debate.

The one thing that seems to be missing from this debate is the issue of unprecedented availability of pirated software online. Search engines like Google bring up a mass of torrent/rapidshare etc links when one is searching for just about any legitimate product and from there it is (mostly) effortless to download just about anything one wants. My question then is a simple one (at least on the surface): Why do the various ISP's around the world allow illegal/copyrighted content to be hosted on, or channeled via, their servers in the first place? It's not exactly rocket science to see what is copyrighted and what is not, is it? I know my ISP would never allow it and they make this clear in their terms and conditions. Furthermore why does Google then happily index all this content to the extent that it does? Just a thought but lets say Google bring out an OS that is for sale - do you think they would allow their system to present illegal links to pirated versions of its OS? Somehow I doubt it but never say never anyway.Where is the line in the sand that seperates a service and a dis-service? At the moment there does not seem to be one at all, as if Google just does not care one way or the other as long as they continue to provide "relevant" search results. Clearly torrents (and the like) are deemed relevant search results.What exactly is the point of convicting the Pirate Bay owners whilst the Pirate Bay website (hosted in Sweden) carries on with business as usual to this very day? Is the Swedish government simply not capable of shutting down a website hosted in their own country? That seems absurd to me.The reality is that today we have a totally kick-&@($* pirated software delivery system, in part thanks to a Swedish ISP, the Swedish government and good ol' Google (Sweden is just an example country here btw, all countries seem to be just as useless in this respect). Throw in torrent clients which are nothing more than highly evolved download managers and things could hardly get better.The other side of this same coin is the fact that ALL this is simply a reflection of what the internet community (as a whole) wants, at least today. If there was no "demand" for the system to work in the way it currently does then things would be different. The question of where this demand comes from is another story altogether...

Hello,A slight backward to the original post ...

An user browses a torrent sight looking for new FS software,not to download but to see what is new.

If nobody noticed .. the amazing thing is those people who are going peruse torrents sites for seen "what's new payware today ?"So it's now become a habit because they know that each new addon is immediately hacked.Free advertising for the devellopers.That's the amazing part.

What exactly is the point of convicting the Pirate Bay owners whilst the Pirate Bay website (hosted in Sweden) carries on with business as usual to this very day? Is the Swedish government simply not capable of shutting down a website hosted in their own country? That seems absurd to me.

Not so absurd...They host only links .. not the material ... exactly like Google or any search engine.If Piratebay MUST close ... Google and tutiquanti must also close or filter such links at least.Regards.Gus.

Not so absurd...They host only links .. not the material ... exactly like Google or any search engine.Gus.

And that makes it ok then, does it? If all these sites/services operate on this distinction then perhaps this thread is looking for morals in the wrong place...

Hello,

And that makes it ok then, does it? If all these sites/services operate on this distinction then this thread is looking for morals in the wrong place.

Seem's that make it ok for some people and governments (despite the Piratebay trial) or it's long time ago Google and tutiquanti had to face trials about piracy or non copyright respectSide note:Google was already sued(and loose) for non copyright respect by some writed newspapers.Regards.Gus.

The one thing that seems to be missing from this debate is the issue of unprecedented availability of pirated software online. Search engines like Google bring up a mass of torrent/rapidshare etc links when one is searching for just about any legitimate product and from there it is (mostly) effortless to download just about anything one wants. My question then is a simple one (at least on the surface): Why do the various ISP's around the world allow illegal/copyrighted content to be hosted on, or channeled via, their servers in the first place? It's not exactly rocket science to see what is copyrighted and what is not, is it? I know my ISP would never allow it and they make this clear in their terms and conditions. Furthermore why does Google then happily index all this content to the extent that it does? Just a thought but lets say Google bring out an OS that is for sale - do you think they would allow their system to present illegal links to pirated versions of its OS? Somehow I doubt it but never say never anyway.Where is the line in the sand that seperates a service and a dis-service? At the moment there does not seem to be one at all, as if Google just does not care one way or the other as long as they continue to provide "relevant" search results. Clearly torrents (and the like) are deemed relevant search results.What exactly is the point of convicting the Pirate Bay owners whilst the Pirate Bay website (hosted in Sweden) carries on with business as usual to this very day? Is the Swedish government simply not capable of shutting down a website hosted in their own country? That seems absurd to me.The reality is that today we have a totally kick-&@($* pirated software delivery system, in part thanks to a Swedish ISP, the Swedish government and good ol' Google (Sweden is just an example country here btw, all countries seem to be just as useless in this respect). Throw in torrent clients which are nothing more than highly evolved download managers and things could hardly get better.The other side of this same coin is the fact that ALL this is simply a reflection of what the internet community (as a whole) wants, at least today. If there was no "demand" for the system to work in the way it currently does then things would be different. The question of where this demand comes from is another story altogether...

One of the things I suggested 18 months ago was that a central registry of official download checksum-type signatures be established, and that ISPs be required to check all downloads against those signatures. This official signature registry would be maintained by the developer community. I'm trying to find the threads that contained discussions of this idea, which was rejected out of hand by most readers. However, I'm with you -- the ISPs are the natural pressure point on this matter, and as computers get faster the scheme becomes increasingly thinkable.The argument is made that ISPs could never be disciplined to follow through on this. Well, yes they could. The Good Guys could refuse to allow packets through that originate from a site on a blacklist. So while the Pirate Bay operation couldn't be shut down, their packets could be blocked.Somebody has to get the ball rolling, why not the FS community? As Francois Dumas of SimFlight remarked one day, he doesn't like this idea but at least I'm thinking outside the box.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxEDIT: Jeroem Wenting (jwenting) has been advocating the subscription model, but my reaction is, How do you get scenery to interact with an authorization server? The answer, of course, is that you can't -- not with FS at least.

The F1 Wrapper System, which we've used from our inception, was chosen for that very reason. Imagine our surprise when we found that it was not as effective against theft as we had hoped.That is the primary reason I've floated the ideas as outlined... Perhaps FS Developers will begin to impliment supplemental protections along the lines of permanent disablement of hacked software.

That's exactly what we are doing since quite some time, and it has been working very well for us because, as I've said in another thread, we know that (sooner or later) our protection will be cracked BUT, it always take A LOT of time to do this because, exactly as you are suggesting, we have a lot of less obvious checks, that makes the product not interesting to use.The results speak for themselves, since we used our system from 2005, when we licensed it to Cloud9.The FS9 version was cracked 2 or 3 times but, it wasn't until 2008, 3 YEARS after it was released, that someone managed to have all Cloud9 products working with a single crack, including the Phantom, that was released in 2006 so, it probably broke *every* world record of duration, for not being cracked in 2 years after its release.Of course, this crack has been made useless, at the first product (or patch) we released at FSDT, after the crack was released. So now, pirate users have to choose between using old cracked Cloud9 products, or new FSDT releases, but not both.The FSX version was cracked only once in 2009, 3 YEARS after we released our wrapper for FSX, and it doesn't work with our latest products (KLAS and KFLL) and of course, it doesn't work with our currently available Trial version, that are being available now.Note that, there are some pirate sites that claim the crack works with all our products, but this is simply not true (we always check each and every crack, the few that were released anyway), and it's quite usual that readme in pirate sites are misleading and contains unreliable informations.We know very well that users have come to know that, even if a crack eventually appear, many months or even years after the product has been released, it will not last long, because it came so late, that we already released a couple of products in the meantime, that would make it useless anyway, because the system it's DESIGNED not to work anymore, as soon as we add a new product to the list, or we simply upgrade the esisting ones.Because of this, we are quite sure that most "borderline" users, have chosen to become legit users, perhaps they'll continue pirating everything else...it's not true that if one chose to be a pirate, he'll never buy anything. If something is PRICED RIGHT, and it's VERY difficult to obtain illegally, the reasoning is somehing like "with all the money I've saved on other stuff, I can probably afford to buy at least the FSDT ones, in order not get mad chasing useless cracks and being alwasy cut off from updates and new products"It makes A LOT of difference to the bottom line, being cracked 0-day, and being cracked after 6 months!! A typical flight sim product sells the most in the first 2-3 months after release, then sales stabilize on a more normal level. So, it's crucial you are protected during the initial period.However, we are still seeing interesting sales of Cloud9 stuff of 2005! BECAUSE, since we killed the old Cloud9 cracks with our new products, I'm sure we are recovering a lot of those "lost sales" of user that *were* interested in the scenery, but managed to got it for free.So, anything you are suggesting here, like adding additional security to the basic activation principle, we are doing it already, and it has worked very well for us, and it's of course available to everyone for licensing. In fact, we are getting several requests from devs, because I feel that piracy, in the currently diminished market, is having a bigger effect on everyone's sales, and our system is very well known to be difficult (difficult=takes a lot of time) to be cracked.Note that, we made *mostly* sceneries, which are usually considered the most difficult to protect.With airplanes, there are LOT more options, the most obvious one, is that you can have protection code BOTH in the secuity module AND in the gauge itself (of course, it must be a C++ gauge), you have the flexibility to choose putting protection code not only in the main gauge, but in each and every subgauge. This means, it wouldn't be enough to crack just the general purchasing module, but also all the gauges. That's why it took 2 years to crack the Phantom and, of course, in 2 years, it sold everything that it has to do...But this would be the most obvious method. However, as an airplane developer, you have additional options at your disposal, the main one is:Crackers might know a lot about hacking, but not so much about flying or how an airplane is supposed to work.This means: you shouldn't do only the obvious things, like printing a message saying "This is a pirate copy, I'll quit from FS, bye, bye...", but you should create AVIATION-related issues, that the cracker will NEVER check for. He'll believe to have successfully cracked the airplane, because it *looks* like the protection is gone but, for an user, it wouldn't work.Some examples ?- Play with fuel, like emptying the fuel tanks after, let's say 30 minutes, if the product has been cracked.- Do strange things. A friend of mine that developed an airplane that was very well protected and never been cracked, moved the airplane to the North Pole randomly (meaning, not happening every time, and only happening well into the flight), if the product was tampered with.- Make the avionics behave bad. What's the point of having an FMC that *purposely* make wrong calculations ? I doubt the cracker would EVER notice, but users will, and you'll be able to spot pirate users, when they'll start complaining about the FMC saying it will take 12 hours to fly from JFK to DCA...There's no limit, except your creativity, to those things, and I don't think a cracker will have the time and knowledge to check for each one. He'll just *think* to have successfully cracked the product, so he'll stop there, and pass to other things.regards,

That's exactly what we are doing since quite some time, and it has been working very well for us because, as I've said in another thread, we know that (sooner or later) our protection will be cracked BUT, it always take A LOT of time to do this because, exactly as you are suggesting, we have a lot of less obvious checks, that makes the product not interesting to use.The results speak for themselves, since we used our system from 2005, when we licensed it to Cloud9.The FS9 version was cracked 2 or 3 times but, it wasn't until 2008, 3 YEARS after it was released, that someone managed to have all Cloud9 products working with a single crack, including the Phantom, that was released in 2006 so, it probably broke *every* world record of duration, for not being cracked in 2 years after its release.Of course, this crack has been made useless, at the first product (or patch) we released at FSDT, after the crack was released. So now, pirate users have to choose between using old cracked Cloud9 products, or new FSDT releases, but not both.The FSX version was cracked only once in 2009, 3 YEARS after we released our wrapper for FSX, and it doesn't work with our latest products (KLAS and KFLL) and of course, it doesn't work with our currently available Trial version, that are being available now.Note that, there are some pirate sites that claim the crack works with all our products, but this is simply not true (we always check each and every crack, the few that were released anyway), and it's quite usual that readme in pirate sites are misleading and contains unreliable informations.We know very well that users have come to know that, even if a crack eventually appear, many months or even years after the product has been released, it will not last long, because it came so late, that we already released a couple of products in the meantime, that would make it useless anyway, because the system it's DESIGNED not to work anymore, as soon as we add a new product to the list, or we simply upgrade the esisting ones.Because of this, we are quite sure that most "borderline" users, have chosen to become legit users, perhaps they'll continue pirating everything else...it's not true that if one chose to be a pirate, he'll never buy anything. If something is PRICED RIGHT, and it's VERY difficult to obtain illegally, the reasoning is somehing like "with all the money I've saved on other stuff, I can probably afford to buy at least the FSDT ones, in order not get mad chasing useless cracks and being alwasy cut off from updates and new products"It makes A LOT of difference to the bottom line, being cracked 0-day, and being cracked after 6 months!! A typical flight sim product sells the most in the first 2-3 months after release, then sales stabilize on a more normal level. So, it's crucial you are protected during the initial period.However, we are still seeing interesting sales of Cloud9 stuff of 2005! BECAUSE, since we killed the old Cloud9 cracks with our new products, I'm sure we are recovering a lot of those "lost sales" of user that *were* interested in the scenery, but managed to got it for free.So, anything you are suggesting here, like adding additional security to the basic activation principle, we are doing it already, and it has worked very well for us, and it's of course available to everyone for licensing. In fact, we are getting several requests from devs, because I feel that piracy, in the currently diminished market, is having a bigger effect on everyone's sales, and our system is very well known to be difficult (difficult=takes a lot of time) to be cracked.Note that, we made *mostly* sceneries, which are usually considered the most difficult to protect.With airplanes, there are LOT more options, the most obvious one, is that you can have protection code BOTH in the secuity module AND in the gauge itself (of course, it must be a C++ gauge), you have the flexibility to choose putting protection code not only in the main gauge, but in each and every subgauge. This means, it wouldn't be enough to crack just the general purchasing module, but also all the gauges. That's why it took 2 years to crack the Phantom and, of course, in 2 years, it sold everything that it has to do...But this would be the most obvious method. However, as an airplane developer, you have additional options at your disposal, the main one is:Crackers might know a lot about hacking, but not so much about flying or how an airplane is supposed to work.This means: you should just do obvious things, like printing a message saying "This is a pirate copy, I'll quit from FS, bye, bye...", but you should create AVIATION-related issues, that the cracker will NEVER check for. He'll believe to have successfully cracked the airplane, because it *looks* like the protection is gone but, for an user, it wouldn't work.Some examples ?- Play with fuel, like empty the fuel tanks after, let's say 30 minutes, if the product has been cracked.- Do strange things. A friend of mine that developed an airplane that was very well protected and never been cracked, moved the airplane to the North Pole randomly (meaning, not happening every time, and only happening well into the flight), if the product was tampered with.- Make the avionics behave bad. What's the point of having an FMC that *purposely* make wrong calculations ? I doubt the cracker would EVER notice, but users will, and you'll be able to spot pirate users, when they'll start complaining about the FMC saying it will take 12 hours to fly from JFK to DCA...There's no limit, except your creativity, to those things, and I don't think a cracker will have the time and knowledge to check for each one. He'll just *think* to have successfully cracked the product, so he'll stop there, and pass to other things.regards,Umberto Colapicchioni - VIRTUALI s.a.s.http://www.fsdreamteam.com

Umberto,Kindly tell us more about licensing your scheme. I agree with you about monkeying with the aircraft, by the way. I have some experimental code in AirBoss that does this kind of thing. (Never mind what AirBoss is.)

Hello,

. However, I'm with you -- the ISPs are the natural pressure point on this matter, and as computers get faster the scheme becomes increasingly thinkable.The argument is made that ISPs could never be disciplined to follow through on this. Well, yes they could. The Good Guys could refuse to allow packets through that originate from a site on a blacklist. So while the Pirate Bay operation couldn't be shut down, their packets could be blocked

Good idea.Just one problem with that ... cause I think it's a by-pass possible if use of proxies.Regards.Gus.

Hello,Good idea.Just one problem with that ... cause I think it's a by-pass possible if use of proxies.Regards.Gus.

It's coming back to me now ... Another thing I suggested was that there be a whitelist -- a list of servers from which downloads were authorized ...... In fact, as I now recall, I suggested that the FS developer/publisher community might maintain a central site whose sole purpose was to do authorized downloads, and that ISP's be required to check downloaded file content. If a file matches a signature but didn't originate at the official download server, the ISP would be required to block the traffic.Yes, this is a utopian vision of the future. But then at one time the notion of a serious computer small enough to fit on somebody's desk was also a utopian vision of the future.

Kindly tell us more about licensing your scheme. I agree with you about monkeying with the aircraft, by the way. I have some experimental code in AirBoss that does this kind of thing. (Never mind what AirBoss is.)

Well, it's quite simple, actually.The developer will need to open an account with Esellerate ( http://www.esellerate.net ), that will do all the order processing, credit cards, activation servers.Then, he'll need to setup up me as an Esellerate SplitPay Payee.This is one of the greatest features Esellerate has, which is very appropriate for a typical Flight sim operation, were you might have several people, not belonging to the same company, or even no company at all, usually located in different countries, so payments could be difficult and cumbersome.With this method, Esellerate collects all the proceedings, deducts its operating fees, and pays each party involved, according to percentages indicated to them by the developer himself. Payments are made every month, but every party involved gets sales reports so, everybody is happy, no "trust" problems whatsoever. Of course, only the developer gets access to customers data, the Payees only get the sales counter, in real time.This can be also used when developing in team with other people, Esellerate will split the proceedings into as many parts the developer will indicate, and this saves a lot of time, money and administrative efforts, becasue Esellerate will handle all payments.We have chosen Esellerate also because its reliability: they are not "just" a flight sim seller, they have thousand of shareware authors as customers so, the infrastructure they use for sales and activations is very large (multiple redundant servers, etc.), something that no fligth sim seller might be able to afford. Esellerate parent company is Digital River, which is the undisputed world-wide leader in e-commerce.The idea is that, adding the Esellerate fees and the license to use my wrapper (that interfaces Esellerate infrastructure with Flight Simulator 9 or X ), combined together, will cost more or less the same than selling through any flight sim portal, but you'll get an effective piracy protection on top of that.If you are interested about the details, contact me via email.