Software Watermarking

[Shub-Nigurrath]

Humm,
about IDA I think that their protection is more a façade, just to safe theyrselves from blaming on piracy. Their tool is so powerful that should be sold only to accredited institutions..this is the common consideration of anti piracy coailitions. Moreover having the name of the buyer embedded into the program ensures an additional hand in protecting the program: which institution would see its name spread around?

After all I beieve that also they knows how technically weak is their protection.

If I was a technical manager at datarescue I would have done the same..

Yes, that is possible. Numega did the same thing with SoftIce. They made it ridiculously easy to bypass the protection. Many thought they did this so they could claim they were not supporting piracy but making it easy enough for SI to be widely used. Then when someone needed a debugger for legitimate reasons they would think of SI and purchase it.

The one difference is that Compuware, (Numega), will sell to anyone and DataRescue will not. It may be that they are one of the few companies smart enough to realize that no software can be completely protected. So instead of spending their time and effort at the impossible task of trying to make their program crackproof, they put their efforts towards making a better product.