a SIMPLE example of Multi-Part Serials

thanos · Post by **thanos** » Mon Aug 25, 2008 4:37 pm

SFSxOI wrote:The BIOS GUID would be good to use.

Or you could also hash a combination of hardware items that don't change in a computer very frequently like a combination of motherboard serial number and processor serial number. This would actually tie the product to a specific computer instead of a specific person.

If your really serious and have the resources to do so, you could have your app report to an authentication server of some type and send the hash. If the hash is still the same the program operation continues, if its changed the program operation is stopped. This would ensure that it is still the same computer, and by inference it would be assumed its still the same person who licensened (purchased) the software.

If the person changes computers a small fee could be charged to license to another computer. Or you could sell the product license in various tiers like tier 1 would get a license to a single computer with a small fee for computer changes, tier 2 would have a main computer use license with flexability to change to an additional computer, etc.....

Just some ideas.

Of course the above are very good ideas!
How can you retrieve the above information from Purebasic code and if you call an api function what about in case of a normal user who have not administrator privileges? What can you retrieve? An empty string? An error?

SFSxOI wrote:True, not all mother boards have a serial number, but all motherboards have some sort of identifying information returned in their information. You could even hash the mother board type/chipset type/ along with the persons IP subnet.

Another very good idea!
To my opinion, it is not a huge problem if the user change once i every two or three years the cpu or the motherboard. He can contact the programmer and the programmer can produce a new serial number for him manually.
So if the programmer can retrieve some information about the motherboard or the cpu or the hard disk serial number and produce an algorithm depending to the combination of them, is an acceptable solution for a "unique" serial number for the user.
Regards.

Thanos