>I've had sufficient experience with dongles to implement >rule 1: If your business depends on it, crack it.
I disagree, and I think that's supremely bad advice. Hopefully you were joking. In many countries, if you actually follow that advice the vendor could successfully sue your business into oblivion. (Most businesses depend on not being sued into oblivion.) Vendors could also unilaterally take a full range of retaliatory actions if (when) they ever discover any such tampering, and in many countries there'd be nothing you could do to prevent that. As examples, the vendor could refuse to ship you patches, version updates, deny any support to you whatsoever, and/or blacklist you and everyone you've ever met (including your second cousin) from ever doing business with the vendor (and the vendor's friends) ever again. And *then* the vendor could sue your business into (further) oblivion. In many countries you could also be liable for criminal penalties. (That'd be personal fines and/or jail time.) But there's an easy solution. If your business really depends on a USB key fob, contact the vendor and buy two, with staggered expiration dates. Put one at site one, the other at site two. As another option, buy one USB key fob, and set up a contract (with a specific Service Level Agreement) for authorized remote hosting as backup. Or implement a legal variation of these basic ideas. Those are much better solutions than doing something (quite frankly, at best) dumb, don't you think? - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan / Asia-Pacific E-Mail: timothy.sipp...@us.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
