Antipiracy: softworkz (any comments?)

White Eagle · Post by **White Eagle** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 1:45 am

You completely missed my point or maybe I didn't do a good job of wording it, so I'll try again....

Gotcha

I agree. I am also not trying to be unduly hard on Armadillo. It is a good product and I used it heavily for a couple of years.

Unfortunately. not all of us programmers are security experts and we need a protection scheme that we can easily integrate into our product, yet provide the most secure protection we can afford. Personally, my skills solely revolve around games. I generally don't write apps and the thought of writing anything database related causes me to grab my daughter's teddy bear and go hide under the bed in fear. I could not "crack" a program to save my life.

Armadillo was perfect for my needs, it was easy to implement and I didn't need to delve into Windows API to implement Armadillo. Armadillo was far more secure than anything I could dream of coming up with on my own, and I really had no methods of "enhancing" Armadillo's protection. At the time I used Armadillo, I felt it was the best out there. I rarely could find a working crack for any Armadillo protected app. Many claimed to work, but few did.

The only point I was trying to make, was that since the Digital River aquisition, that has changed. I am seeing a LOT of Armadillo protected apps being cracked. I am seeing cracks for Armadillo protected apps that NEVER had cracks available before (even big name titles that go for $200, etc). Does this mean Armadillo sucks, no. But, IMHO, Armadillo is not as secure as it used to be.

I am glad I don't have to worry about it anymore, as now I only plan to release freeware.

Tipperton · Post by **Tipperton** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 2:58 am

White Eagle wrote:The only point I was trying to make, was that since the Digital River aquisition, that has changed. I am seeing a LOT of Armadillo protected apps being cracked. I am seeing cracks for Armadillo protected apps that NEVER had cracks available before (even big name titles that go for $200, etc). Does this mean Armadillo sucks, no. But, IMHO, Armadillo is not as secure as it used to be.

I'll agree with you on that point, and as the only one left of the original Silicon Realms trio, it bothers me, but...

Armadillo is still quite secure, the problem for us is that the crackers have gotten much more sophisticated in their attacks on Armadillo which makes it much harder to defeat them. but we'll keep trying...

White Eagle · Post by **White Eagle** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 4:39 am

as the only one left of the original Silicon Realms trio

I sent this to you guys back in December of '03.

I started with the 1.X pro version. I never upgraded past the last 3.x pro version, but one thing I can say about you guys, was the two times I encountered a bug and emailed you guys, I had a fixed version within a couple of hours. I have never seen another company provide that kind of customer service.

Its always a war with crackers. Sometimes you are one step ahead of them, sometimes they are one step ahead of you. Even back in the DOS days, it was rampant. Even before the WWW took over, you would find cracks on local BBSes, programs like Neverlock, etc. Heck, I can remember back in the day working at Microprose, we had people upload cracks for our programs on our own BBS

With the power of processors today, dual core processors now a standard, and quad cores on the way, the crackers have more power than ever for their use. I would be amazed if there is anything "crack proof" out there in this day and age.